Chris had the forethought to mow the grass around the big sweet chestnut tree at the beginning of September, so when the chestnuts started dropping they were really easy to collect.
I spotted a likely-looking recipe on The Cottage Smallholder blog for Sweet Chestnut Jam, and got on with it.
The recipe recommends you collect about 1.8 kg to give you around 1.5 kg usable chestnuts. I manage to pick up 2 kg in about ten minutes, with the help of Ben, who has perfected the technique of getting them out of their surprisingly prickly cases by standing on them in his trainers and pulling back the petals with his toes.
By happy coincidence, a two-litre plantpot holds one kilo, almost exactly.
This is when the tedious bit begins. To shell them, I followed the advice given in this YouTube video, which explains (at some length) that all you need to do is chop them in half and throw them in a pan of boiling water. Once the water returns to the boil, lift out the chestnuts, then squeeze the flesh out of the shell by grasping the shell with a pair of pliers.
When this works, it works, but you have to do it quickly and with relatively small batches because once the chestnuts cool they are not so easy to peel. A big advantage of this method is that you can see straight away if any are bad or infested. It should also get rid of a lot of the papery inside skin. However, it still took me around an hour and a half to shell my 2 kilos, and much of the papery skin remained.
The next step is to boil for around an hour. Once the chestnuts are completely soft you need to mash them up. I used my trusty mouli, in the hope that it would puree the flesh and sieve out the skins in one easy step, but in reality most of the inner skin (except for the bits that I fished out) got mushed up too. I hope it’s not poisonous.
At this stage I covered the bowl, put it in the fridge and collapsed into bed.
So, the next day the recipe continued with 800 g sugar dissolved into 200 ml water. The chestnut puree was added (it didn’t look like there would be enough liquid, but there was) and the mixture was simmered for about 20 minutes. Finally, I added 100 ml of Michelle’s boozy vanilla extract (thanks, Michelle!) and cooked a bit longer.
This quantity yielded around 4-5 jars. According to my kids, it would be an acceptable substitute for Nutella in a pinch.
