Chestnut Coffee Cake (v)

"Like if a tree was a soft and sweet and you could bite into it"

Last weekend I went to my first chestnut festival, at Big River Chestnuts in Sunderland, MA. The day was crisp and sunny, the air smelled of chestnuts literally roasting on an open fire, and the place was hopping with kids and people not wearing shoes; essentially a harvest festival in the Shire. There were vendors selling all kinds of mushrooms, pawpaws, and persimmons. My table was set up overlooking the orchard, where chestnut trees were interspersed with aronia shrubs — a practice called alley-cropping, that improves the soil health.

I wrote last week about agroforestry and tree crops, but only touched on chestnuts, which have been the main focus of my baking experiments lately. I’ve been using them exclusively in the form of chestnut flour, sourced mainly from Breadtree Farms, but I’m hoping to get some fresh chestnuts soon. Sadly or happily, my bakery stand at the festival was so swamped all day that I didn’t even get to try a roasted chestnut.

Chestnuts are much more familiar as a food group to Europeans and Asians — Italians make necci (chestnut crepes) and pasta from the flour, the French have marron glacé (candied chestnuts), there’s a Japanese chestnut rice dish called kuri gohan, yakbap (a glutinous rice cake with chestnuts, jujubes, and pine nuts) is a celebration food in Korea. For the most part, Americans don’t have experience with them due to the blight 100 years ago that wiped out almost all American chestnut trees. The recent attempts at bringing back the chestnut (usually an Asian cultivar or an Asian-American hybrid) rely on building up a market and taste for chestnuts among more people here. I’ve been adding chestnut flour to everything from focaccia to donuts and finding its flavor and texture to be wonderfully unique and moreish.

Today I’m sharing a chestnut coffee cake, with a moist, nutty cake layer and a sweet-salty crumble made up of chestnut flour, brown sugar, toasted pecans, and cinnamon. My friend Leanne recently tried it and described it as “if a tree was a soft and sweet and you could bite into it.” I dunno about you but there’s something about the beautiful colors of autumn that always make me want to bite a tree.

As always, this recipe isn’t terribly sweet, so you could have it for breakfast or an afternoon snack. I love the pairing of spelt and chestnut flour, so it’s 100% wholegrain. The recipe also makes a high proportion of streusel to cake (think NY-style coffee cake), but if you’d rather have a thinner layer, you can make ½ or ¾ the amount of streusel. (Or if you have extra streusel you can eat it with yogurt.)

Note: The recipe below is paywalled, but you can try it out for free by referring just two friends:

I make mine into mini coffee cakes, but you can also use a larger baking dish

Recipe: Chestnut Coffee Cake (v)