I had been planning to go to Chinatown, where fresh chestnuts are everywhere and cheap. Then I would peel them, cook in syrup, and make a loaf of chestnut bread chock-full of chestnut pieces.
A month went by, and I still hadn't made it to Chinatown. The few I got from Chelsea were roasted and gone in an hour. When I was telling a friend about this project that would involve a load of peeling fresh chestnuts, he went "why don't you just rinse off the syrup a bit from the canned chestnuts?"
"That's just wrong!"
Wrong in a sense that fresh chestnuts are all around and I resort to canned ones, often too sweet and too perfectly shaped. So I finally made a trip to Chinatown, got the chestnuts, peeled the chestnuts for 2 hours, then took a nap. I simmered my fresh chestnuts in simple syrup (sugar:water = 1:1) and ended with a spoonful of corn syrup to get them all shiny. Now I have my own preserved chestnuts for the winter. Or at least for a week.
Having spent time and effort to keep the chestnuts whole, I didn't want to go with my original plan of chopping them to pieces and roll in bread dough. So I wrapped each chestnut with all purpose flour/sweet rice flour (e.g., mochiko) dough and shaped them like chestnuts to resemble what is actually inside. Mini chestnut cakes in Korea (baam manju, 밤만주), originated from Japan, usually have sweet bean-paste filling. Although I've accepted the reality of the looks vs. the tastes, which is often a pleasant surprise, I still remember the disappointment I felt when I first found out coffee cakes don't actually have coffee in the cake mix.
It can go through a few more iterations, but this thing I named 'chestnut in chestnut' is soft and slightly flaky. The best part is that every bite reminds me of the effort I went through to peel each chestnut. What you see is what you get.
| KOREAN WORDS | ||||
| chestnut | 밤 | (baam) | ||
| sugar | 설탕 | (seol tang) | ||
| water | 물 | (mul) | ||
