Nuts

Castanea mollissima

Castanea mollissima is the Chinese chestnut, widely grown for reliable crops and blight resilience relative to American chestnut. Nuts are sweet when cooked and dominate much of the fresh chestnut supply in North American markets that no longer have wild C. dentata. Chinese chestnut supports roasting, stuffing, and processing into kernels for export. A good nut is full and sweet after steaming; a bad one is dried out or mixed with spoiled fruit. Peeling still rewards warm work after cooking. In orchards hybrid programmes often lean on Chinese genetics for survival traits. For cooks, it behaves as a standard sweet chestnut in recipes calling for peeled meats or roasting.