Sweet Chestnuts in Tuscany: Think that the only thing you can do is roast them? Think Again.

If you have been lucky enough to go to one of the local chestnut festivals (Sagre delle Castagne) this month, you will have seen the myriad selection of cakes, tarts, pasta, sweets and preserves that the Tuscans have devised using this much-loved, humble fruit.  These events have been running throughout October, and involve train-loads of Italians schlepping up to tiny towns in the hills at weekends to eat chestnuts, drink, eat chestnut pasta, drink, eat chestnut cakes and make merry.

If you need a reminder that Autumn is here, in spite of the sun, you can pick up roasted chestnuts (caldarroste). However, at a chestnut festival these are not the tiny bags of warm-ish chestnuts sprinkled with salt available on the English High Street. You will get an enormous bag of the things, charred to perfection over a wood fire in an enormous metal drum. You eat these without salt, but with the delicious accompaniment of a glass (or few) of sweet red wine which complements their smoky flavour and also smooths over their dry texture.

This is the tip of the iceberg; we proceed to conserves. Not just jams, obviously… Jars of chestnuts submerged under grappa and rum, the very thought of which is enough to make you tipsy, or for those cultivating the Italian sweet tooth (and definitely NOT those with any family history of diabetes) quintessential candied chestnuts, marroni canditi. Do you want any chestnut with that nugget of sugar? No? Ok.

This being Italy you will, of course, find chestnuts used in pasta. The fruits are used to stuff ravioli and often combined with a meat sauce for a savoury dish that screams of autumn. Stalls also sell  version made with a sweet dough and fried.

Cakes are also made using chestnut flour. Honestly, they are aren’t the best looking. Castagnaccio is the most common and looks a bit like an under-baked brownie (other, less flattering comparisons have been made!). It is often scattered with nuts, dried fruit and rosemary. The texture is unlike any English cake I have ever experienced, not quite dough but not a sponge either, sort of like a fridge cake without chocolate. Torta di castagne is a speciality local to Marradi (a town north of Florence famous for its chestnuts and its sagra) and is chestnut tart with a very thin, soft pastry and a chestnut mousse filling. The flavour of both cakes is quite delicate, and the variation in texture and taste from the nuts on the castagnaccio might be a bit of a relief to the English palate.

Slightly easier on the eye is the crostata di marrone e ricotta, a tart with two layers of filling – one yellow and one brown – and a pastry much more like what we’re used to in Blighty or the tronco which is a swiss roll with a chestnut filling.

The best looking and best tasting thing I have seen resembles an oversized pink macaron. It was in fact a ball of sponge, with a crunchy, pink sugar-coated exterior and concealing a marron glacé at its centre. Not exactly good for you, but I think you’ll agree that that doesn’t really seem to be the point of the Chestnut Festival!

Chestnuts are available in most fruttivendoli at the moment so have a look for them, and look out for some of the confections mentioned above in pasticcerie and gastronomie too. If you’re looking to eat as much authentic Tuscan food as possible whilst you’re here, a few chestnut dishes are going to have to be added to the To Eat list.

- Sophia Dzwig, Intern at the BIF