Nuts - freezing, roasting and skinning

 

With the holidays coming up, many of the foods I plan to make use nuts, so I have accumulated a lot of nuts that are sitting in my freezer.  Why the freezer?  Storing them in the freezer helps extend their life.  All nuts contain oils and eventually these oils can go rancid which alters the taste of the nuts.  So all my nuts go into the freezer and last much longer than if stored at room temperature.

Roasting nuts is very easy.  Toss them onto a cooking tray and roast them for about 10 minutes at 350 F.  The roasting will fill your kitchen with a wonderful aroma and will intensify the flavor of the nuts.  If you're going to chop them, I would suggest doing that after you roast them.

With hazelnuts you have another problem --- what to do about the skins.  It seems that most of the time it is recommended that you use skinned hazelnuts in baking.  You can buy them skinned but not usually if you get them at your local grocery store.  You usually have to order them from a nut producer and have them mailed; and you can order skinned or unskinned, roasted or raw.  Why skin the nuts?  I usually hear two reasons:  appearance of the finished product and bitterness of the skins.  Taking those one at a time, I think bits of skin ground up or chopped up with nuts actually looks very nice in a cookie or a cake, etc.  And I have personally never noticed a bitterness that comes from skins of hazelnuts.  Consequently, I never skin them.  But if you wanted do it, how would you do it?

After roasting the nuts, the skins will more easily come off than if you try to do it before.  An oft-recommended technique is to pour the roasted nuts onto a large towel, then roll the towel over the nuts and hold the ends  Then start shaking and rolling and rattling the nuts to help them shed their skins.  If you've tried this you know what I know and that is that the skins flake off every where and aren't contained in the towel very easily and then your towel has many many flakes of the hazelnuts embedded in the fabric.  And to top it off, you don't even get all the skins off the nuts.

Here's an easier technique.  Get a large gallon-sized plastic bag, pour the nuts in, seal the bag and then start shaking the bag up and down.  Acting sort of like a rock polisher, this cause the nuts to tumble against each other in the bag and bit by bit the skins come off.  How long you want to do this is up to you.  As for me, I don't mind the skins on.  But try this out and you'll find it will work really well.

Have a great autumn week, everyone.