NYTimes: The Revival of the American Chestnut

Revisiting a Sweet and Starchy Nut

Chestnut trees once grew in thick groves throughout the eastern United States, serving as a source of both food and medicine. Indigenous tribes such as the Cherokees combined their nuts with dried corn kernels, pounding the mixture into a meal that they used to make tamale-like cakes boiled in corn leaves. They steeped a tea from year-old leaves to treat heart pain and another from young leaves for healing sores. But after a blight in the early 20th century almost entirely wiped out the species, what was once a staple became a specialty food often imported from Europe and Asia. Now regenerative farmers, sometimes working alongside Native nations, are restoring the trees, leading more American chefs to embrace the sweet and starchy nut.

At Brooklyn’s She Wolf Bakery, the pastry chef Sarah Vitale, 43, mixes chestnut meal into her shortbread dough, drawn to its cornmeal-like texture and warm flavor. And Clare de Boer, 37, the chef-owner of Stissing House in Pine Plains, N.Y., adds chestnut flour — which she describes as “fudgy and mouth coating” — to her brownies and chocolate cake, sourcing it from Breadtree, a farm with orchards in upstate New York and southwestern Vermont. Blue Hill at Stone Barns, the chef Dan Barber’s restaurant in Tarrytown, N.Y., also offers dishes featuring Breadtree chestnuts, as well as some from trees planted on the Stone Barns farm about 20 years ago. For one chestnut-rich dessert, the executive pastry chef, Joel de la Cruz, 48, layered chestnut purée with a chestnut-maple sablé, fig jam and chestnut-rum gelato, finishing it with candied and deep-fried chestnuts and foam scented with smoked chestnut husks.

Still, the tree remains relatively scarce on this side of the Atlantic, compelling some chefs to work with a middleman like Sasha Sherman of the Great Chestnut Experiment, who, in addition to selling the nuts wholesale, connects farmers directly with restaurants. He also makes a jarred spiced-chestnut cream — available online and at some specialty markets — which the chef Matt Aita, 45, used as a filling for brioche buns last winter at the cafe and grocery Isle of Us, on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. This fall, Aita is hoping to develop a dish with fresh chestnuts, despite the labor they require — the nuts must be scored, steamed or roasted, then stripped of their outer layer and the skin underneath. “The juice,” he says, “is worth the squeeze.”

— Lauren Joseph

URL: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/21/t-magazine/chestnut-cooking-dessert.html?smid=em-share