We’ve collected a number of recipes that use chestnuts, some of which we didn’t end up liking.  The one that has been the best was chestnut flour pancakes.  This is the recipe that we started with, and I converted the metric measurements to English (and the weights to volumes).  I further changed the proportion of white flour to chestnut flour.  Here is the form of the recipe I currently use:

.75 cups white flour
.5 cup chestnut flour
2 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
1 tbsp sugar
1 egg
1 cup milk
2 tbsp oil

To make the chestnut flour, we just take the good meats and grind them up in a small food processor.  Then we store the flour in the freezer until we want to use it.

As I mentioned in the previous post, peeling the roasted chestnuts is hard on the hands.  We did roasting again in 2010, though we hardly got any chestnuts that year.  This year, we wanted to see if there was a way to make things softer and easier.  From some more research, we decided to try boiling the chestnuts instead of roasting them.  The prep is the same – cutting an X in each nut – and then they get boiled in a pot for 20 minutes.

Boiling seems to make a big difference in the softness of the shells as well as the tenderness of the meats.  Our hands no longer hurt from the peeling, and we weren’t finding a significant number of hard nut meats.  Some sites say that it’s nice to boil the nuts and then roast them briefly to finish them, but we found with the nuts this year that the boiled ones taste just fine.  They’ve been great, and we’ve got a lot of flour put up at this point, as we had another bumper crop of nuts.

And chestnut pancakes have become our regular Saturday breakfast for the past 6 weeks or so.  We’ll probably have them again tomorrow.