Chestnut flour is gluten free, naturally sweet and delicious! A food dehydrator helps to speed up the process.
Chestnuts have cases with sharp fine needles - not to be confused with the spiky shelled and poisonous Horse Chestnut! The nut cases and tree leaves are quite different, so double check your ID before collecting.
METHOD
Gather as many sweet chestnuts as you can and are prepared to peel!
The gathered sweet chestnuts need to be slitted or crossed carefully with a knife, boiled for approx 20 mins to loosen the skins, ready to peel away the shells.
At this point, it is defintely worth putting a few of your peeled whole chestnuts into the freezer ready to add to any meals if you wish!
Once peeled, the chestnuts can be chopped in a food processor and laid on baking parchment to dry for about 6 hours in the oven on a low heat or in a food dehydrator.
After drying, grind the chestnut pieces in a coffee grinder or similar device to obtain a flour. Sometimes the nuts can still be quite sticky and damp at the grinding stage. If this happens, more drying is required! So either pop the chopped nuts, or a ground flour back into the oven/ dehydrator for further drying.
Chestnut flour has to be kept in the fridge in an air tight container and will keep for up to 3 months, or in the freezer for 6 months.
You can grind the flour to your desired consistency. Sometimes we need it to be fine, other times, eg for Sweet Chestnut biscuits, it's nice to have more of a crunchy, nutty texture,
Using trial and error, we have found it easier to peel the chestnuts when fresh, cutting off the 'bottom' and peeling back to the top to remove the shells and as much husk as possible in one, softer piece.
WILD FOOD & FORAGE DAYS
If you'd like to discover more of nature's harvest, why not join one of our wild food and forage day workshops which run in Spring and Autumn.