Roasted Hazelnuts

Simply in Season concludes each chapter with what it calls a section of “Extras.” This is a feature that was more prominent in More with Less, but there are some neat how-tos in Simply in Season as well. This is one of them.

Truthfully, I almost didn’t buy the hazelnuts for the Hazelnut Coffee Brownies . They were $6 for a bag. Then one of my friends mentioned that she had purchased some filberts (which are raw hazelnuts, who knew?) at Horrocks for only $4. So I decided to give it a try and toast my own, because I was pretty sure I remembered seeing a recipe for roasting them in Simply in Season.

The process is fairly simple. The photo above is the raw nuts spread single file on a baking stone. I put them in a preheated 275F oven for 30 minutes.

Then they looked like this:

And it’s hard to tell from the photo, but the skins are much darker and have started to split a little bit. Then I ran off to the gym, but while they are still warm you’re supposed to rub them inside a rough cloth to remove the skins. I tried it when they were all cooled off, and it still worked

Well sort of. I didn’t have all night to sit there rubbing nuts so I got the majority of it off but decided my co-workers were going to have to deal with a few skins in their homemade brownies.

Oh yeah, the book says you can use this technique for walnuts too – and also gives 5 minute versions for stovetop and microwave. But if you don’t need them immediately I think the oven is the least labor-intensive way to go.

This post linked to Kitchen Tip Tuesdays