Chestnuts arrive in our stores just one season of the year. Ours come from High Rock Farm on the Haw River in Gibsonville, NC.
High Rock Farm chestnuts are special for many reasons. The farm is on the site of General Nathanael Greene’s 1781 headquarters and has an 1807 farmhouse. The Teague family, who bought the farm in 1990, planted nut trees to enhance the value of the farm without ruining its historical accuracy. Chestnut trees were once abundant in America, but they began to die off in the early 1900s when a blight came to America from Asia. We now have a Chinese/American hybrid chesnut that is resistant to the blight.
The nuts are part of the small supply that’s available locally: the United States imports forty million pounds each year, but produces only one million. Most chestnuts come from far-away Italy, China, and South Korea. High Rock Farm is beginning to fill that gap with their chestnut orchard, now numbering over 500 trees. The farm produces 25,000 pounds of chestnuts a year, which are hand-picked off the ground in September and October. The nuts fall to the ground when their burrs open, signaling that they are ripe. Nuts are cleaned and sorted before shipping to stores. To extend the season, the farm makes value-added nut products like gluten-free chestnut flour. They also have pecan trees and make sugar-toasted pecans.
High Rock chestnuts are in stores; buy them by the pound in Hillsborough and Carrboro or by the quart in Southern Village. Look for chestnut flour and sugar-toasted pecans arriving soon. Chestnuts can be roasted in a baking pan in the oven for 30-40 minutes at 425 degrees; you need to shake the pan occasionally. Or you can boil chestnuts for 20 minutes. If you want to try the open-fire method, watch Brianne and Kevin roast them in front of our Hillsborough store in the video below. Check out these additional recipes using chestnuts or chestnut flour. The chestnut supply is limited and sometimes supplies run low closer to the holidays, so don’t delay.