Another walk in the forest! Making crème de marrons (sweet chestnut cream)

[french fries]

So now that mushroom season is nearly over, I went back in the forest and this time found chestnuts!! Made crème de marrons which is quite labor intensive but oh so precious to me for the upcoming cold winter season morning breakfasts!!!

Here's what I found:



I brought back home 4 kg of those bad boys:



First I took off the peel:



Then cooked them for 45mn in boiling water:



Then removed the inner peel:



Then pureed them:



Prepared a simple organic sugar syrup infused with Tahitian Vanilla beans:



Mixed in the puree and blended with the syrup:



Cooked it down for about 1/2 hour:



And filled pots with my crème de marrons!

 

[french fries]

Final result:

 

[brianshaw]

Yum, yum, yum!

 

[Seoul Food]

Looks great. I'm embarrassed to say I had no idea they started out in that spiky husk thing. Makes me wonder how the squirrels get to them.

 

[french fries]

Looks great. I'm embarrassed to say I had no idea they started out in that spiky husk thing. Makes me wonder how the squirrels get to them.

Yeah I suppose most of the time worms get to them first.

Even for us humans it's kind of a pain getting the chestnuts out of their cupule. Normally when they reach maturity the cupule splits but sometimes it doesn't, and sometimes the split is not wide enough to get to the fruits. I usually just tread on them with my shoes to get the fruits out. If you get to them with your fingers you WILL get hurt. Sometimes you get lucky and find a fruit that sprung out of his cupule on its own. Here's one that I found just like this, lying on the forest floor on its own. It was a big beautiful fruit too!

 

[harpua]

My mouth is watering.. looks amazing!

 

[nicko]

This is a great post!!!! Thank you for sharing how much do you charge to send me a jar?