Ingredient

Hazelnuts

Hazelnuts are sweet, rich and distinctly aromatic, and they are one of the few nuts whose flavour genuinely changes character when toasted — raw they are mild and slightly green, toasted they develop the warm, buttery, praline-like quality that makes them what they are.

Toasting and skinning them

Both in one operation, and the skinning is the fiddly bit.

1. Spread the hazelnuts on a tray in a single layer.
2. Roast in a moderate oven for ten to fifteen minutes, shaking once or twice, until they smell strongly nutty and the skins have cracked and darkened.
3. Tip them straight onto a clean tea towel while they are hot.
4. Wrap them up and rub them together firmly through the cloth. Most of the skins come away.
5. Accept that some will not. Chasing the last twenty per cent is not worth it for most dishes, and a few flecks of skin do no harm.
6. For a completely clean result — for a pale praline or a smooth paste — blanch them instead: a minute in boiling water with bicarbonate of soda, then the skins slip off, then dry and toast them.

Why they go with what they go with

Hazelnut has an aromatic profile that overlaps strongly with the compounds produced by browning — the same family of nutty, caramel, toasted notes that come out of a Maillard reaction.

That is the underlying reason for its classic partnerships. Chocolate, particularly milk chocolate, which shares roasted and caramel notes; the combination is old enough to have its own name, gianduja. Brown butter, which is doing chemically what toasting the nut does. Coffee, for the same reason. Caramel and praline, obviously.

On the savoury side it works with brown butter and sage, with roasted brassicas — sprouts, cauliflower, romanesco — with blue cheese, and with bitter leaves like chicory and radicchio, where its sweetness answers the bitterness.

What to do with them

• Praline. Toasted hazelnuts in set caramel, then crushed or ground. The foundation of an enormous amount of patisserie.
• Hazelnut paste or gianduja, ground until the oil releases and it becomes smooth. Ground with chocolate it is the ancestor of every chocolate hazelnut spread.
• In cakes and biscuits, ground in place of some of the flour. Hazelnut and chocolate cake, dacquoise, financiers.
• Over roasted vegetables, roughly chopped, with brown butter or good oil.
• In a salad with bitter leaves, blue cheese and a sharp dressing.
• Romesco — the Catalan sauce of roasted pepper, tomato, bread and nuts, in which hazelnut and almond are both traditional.
• In a pesto, with parsley or basil.
• Hazelnut oil, which is expensive, strongly flavoured and for dressing rather than for cooking — heat destroys it.

Buying and keeping

Form

Whole blanched, whole with skins, chopped, ground, and as a paste. Whole with skins keeps best and tastes best toasted at home.

Freshness

Like all nuts, they go rancid. Taste one — sharp, bitter or waxy means the batch is past it.

Storage

Cool, dark, airtight. The fridge or freezer for anything you are keeping more than a couple of months.

Ground hazelnuts

Convenient, and they go stale much faster than whole ones because of the exposed surface. Buy small quantities.

Filberts and cobnuts

Regional and varietal names for hazelnuts and their close relatives. Fresh green Kentish cobnuts are a seasonal treat, quite different — milky, crisp and sweet, eaten raw.

Allergen

Hazelnuts are tree nuts, one of the fourteen allergens that must be declared in food sold in the UK.

Common questions