Nuts

Flour

Chestnut flour is a pale, fine powder milled from dried chestnut kernels after they have already been cooked or carefully dried and freed of shell and skin. The miller is grinding a starchy, low-fat nutmeat—not toasting an oily snack nut—so the powder behaves more like a sweet gluten-free meal than like almond flour. It smells faintly of honey and dried fruit when fresh, and it browns into a warm, cake-like crumb when baked. Italian necci, Corsican pulenda, French farine de châtaigne cakes, and modern gluten-free pancakes all depend on this flour’s gentle sweetness and weak structure. It almost never stands alone as a yeast-bread flour; bakers blend it with eggs, starches, or a little wheat when lift matters. Sift before measuring—it clumps—and weigh for consistency. A good bag is dry, free-flowing, ivory to soft beige, and sweetly aromatic. A bad bag is grey, musty, lumpy from moisture, or bitter from old stock that absorbed cupboard smells. Keep it airtight and cool; moisture ruins it faster than mild fat rancidity would ruin walnut meal. This is not the stage for peeling shells: that work finished before the kernels ever reached the mill.