DEBORAH CROMBIE: Most of us know pine nuts from their most common use in the U.S., which is for pesto. But I've become enamoured with the little things. I usually toast them, very gently, in a non-stick pan. As soon as they start to take on a golden hue, you should take them off the heat, then tip them into another dish to cool. Just the residual heat from the pan can cause them to scorch, as I've discovered to my dismay. Once cool, I usually put them in a storage container in the fridge to be used as needed. Oh, and although they're sold unrefrigerated, I keep the raw nuts in the fridge too for longer life.
Which brings us to the question, is a pine nut a nut or a seed? They are actually seeds, and are harvested from about twenty different species of pines around the world, and they've been used in cooking in Europe and Asia since Paleolithic times.
There are American varieties--here's cool photo of pines nuts being loaded for shipment in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 1921.
However, most pine nuts sold today in the U.S. come from China, so maybe I should stockpile them in the fridge, or eat more ecologically and budget friendly American-grown pecans. Texas, you should know, is one of the largest pecan producers in the country, and it's also our state tree! We even have pecan trees in our back yard, but unfortunately they are the native type, not the cultivated variety, and they are bitter. The squirrels, however, love them.
But back to pine nuts, as long as I'm abandoning my ecological principles. I put the toasted nuts on salads, on pasta, and on pretty much anything that just needs a little bit of a lift. Today I had a sprinkle on a black bean veggie burger with avocado. Last night I had them sprinkled on tiny ricotta and spinach ravioli, with olive oil, parmesan, and a tiny bit of butter. Delish!
Pine nuts are used in flour, in cakes and cookies, and in sweets like baklava, as well. Having just seen a recipe for torta della nonna (or granny's cake) I'm tempted to take up baking. Shortcrust pastry and a custard filling, with pine nuts and powdered sugar on the top. They should make this on Great British Bake Off!
REDS and readers, are you pine nut fans? And do you have another rather odd food obsession?
Although those all sound delicious, I have no experience with pine nuts [other than if they are in a jar of pesto I've purchased] . . . .
ReplyDeleteYou should give them a try, Joan!
DeleteI do love pine nuts and always have some in the freezer but rarely use them outside of pesto. You have given me ideas now!
ReplyDeleteI'm quite fond of nutritional yeast flakes. It's nutty and so good on popcorn, sprinkled on salad, and added to a bowl of cereal. And it's really good for you!
we used to eat that yeast back in hippy days Edith. Haven't tasted it in years!
DeleteI often add nutritional yeast to my salads and my soups. It adds taste and good nutrients
DeleteIf there are no dairy nor gluten in the nutritional yeast, then I would like to try it myself.
DeleteNutritional yeast is so tied to hippy days for me! I haven't tried it in years. Maybe time for a reboot!
DeleteMmm, pine nuts! I also dry toast them on the stove, and add them to any kind of pasta, sometimes along with some rehydrated dried tomatoes I keep in the freezer. So tasty.
ReplyDeleteIs hot honey an odd food obsession, or a trend? And after having a couple varieties of delectable giant beans in Greece, I am craving them here. They look like fava beans, but they are melt-in-the-mouth soft, cooked in a rich tomato sauce. The Greeks serve almost every meal family style, with one person ordering. My son-in-law chose these if they were on the menu and they were always delicious.
Karen, I buy heirloom beans from Rancho Gordo. There are other vendors. There are some varieties that are simply amazing (some of them "giant").
DeleteI keep seeing recipes for hot honey this and that, but haven't tried any of them. Maybe I should!
DeleteKaren, I think Trader Joe's has cans of giant beans in tomato sauce and olive oil. I'm going to look tomorrow. I haven't tried any of the giant beans from Rancho Gordo but I'll bet they're good.
I really like Camelia brand beans out of New Orleans. Some of them I can find in the grocery store but they are available online. In fact, I'm cooking Camelia lentils tonight. https://www.camelliabrand.com/product-category/dried-beans-peas-lentils/
Debs, hot honey is especially good on chicken. A favorite gastropub here makes fabulous buttermilk fried chicken with hot honey.
DeleteI'm pretty sure the giant, or Florina, beans we had were fresh, not dried. But we clearly need to do more research! ;-)
Dens, I will remember your caution about toasting the pine nuts! We love pine nuts & do keep them in the refrigerator. We don’t make our own pesto but love adding the toasted ones to all sorts of dishes - scrambled eggs and omelets, salads, over pasta dishes, in stews….
ReplyDeleteOoh, scrambled eggs! What a good idea! And I have to admit I'm too lazy to make my own pesto most of the time:-) Costco normally has a really good pesto which I've been buying for years, but the last batch was weird. I will try again.
DeleteChopped toasted pecans from TJs. I sprinkle them on my yogurt.
ReplyDeleteI put them in my homemade granola. So good!
DeleteI must admit that I never bought pine nuts.
ReplyDeleteI love to add nuts and seeds to my salads and stir fries to add some protein and for taste.
I’m the greatest fan of the locally sourced and organic sunflower anything: sprouts sunflower seeds, roasted sunflower seeds and sunflower oil.
I don't think to eat sunflower seeds as often as I should. I put pumpkin seeds in my granola, so will remember to add sunflower, too. I do, however, eat sunflower butter instead of peanut or almond butter. I just love the taste. The brand is Sun Butter, and they do make an unsweetened one, although not all the stores carry it. I have to make a special effort, but sunflower butter does not need sugar added!
DeleteInteresting. I have a bag of pine nuts waiting for me to have a stroke of inspiration. They are probably well past fresh at this point. Alas.
ReplyDeleteI have had them in various dishes from pasta to desserts in restaurants and love the flavor. I have a memory of peeling off round, waxy little shells (similar to opening pumpkin seeds) and eating them at my grandmother's apartment in NYC when I was really small. Is that a real memory?
Judy I wonder if the seeds/nuts might have been pistachios? They aren't waxy though but have shells.
DeleteJudy, they do have shells but we usually only see them processed in stores now. I'll bet they were pine nuts! Next time you buy pine nuts, stick them in the freezer, or at least the fridge. And you really don't need much inspiration. Just toast and toss a handful on salad or pasta or soup.
DeleteAnd here I thought pine nuts were crazy people from Maine.
ReplyDeleteWell you may be right Jerry! hahah
DeleteToo funny, Jerry!
DeletePine nuts sound delicious. I've only had them in pesto, or maybe at a restaurant. My Texas grandma used to talk longingly about pecans, which weren't really available in the '60s in Oregon.
ReplyDeleteApparently, you need long, hot, humid summers to grow pecans, which we certainly have. I hate to see so many of our local pecan orchards going under the developers bulldozers here in north Texas.
DeleteTofu is a food, which I love, though I know some people are not fond of. Only time I like pine nuts is in a very sweet dish like the baklava. Perhaps not these days since I started menopause. Tomatoes, potatoes and aubergines (eggplant) are also favorites.
ReplyDeleteI like tofu, too, Diana, and just need to come up with some ways to convince my husband to eat it... I'm not crazy about baklava--too sweet for me--but I loved the sound of the torta della nonna.
DeleteTorta della nonna is often lemony, I think. Not too sweet. There is not a standard recipe, I think, given it's "grandma's cake." I'm heading to Italy "for work" next week. I'll try to hunt out some torta della nonna. I place we went to years ago used to have it.
DeleteEat some for me, Beth!
DeleteWell, I googled "torta della nonna," and all of the hits showed pastry cream in the middle of the cade, with the top studded with pine nuts. I've only eaten this cake in Venice, and I have never seen this iteration. I will do my best to search out the different varieties. I am hoping to go to Trent for a day, and they apparently have wonderful desserts there. We'll see.
DeleteI think there are some pine nuts in our pantry right now for making pesto from home grown basil, but I am not the one in this household who does any of those things so I can’t be sure. There are cubes of frozen pesto in our freezer.
ReplyDeleteFood obsessions: all kinds of cheese. Seems I just can’t resist it.
Cheese!! Oh my goodness. I have just discovered the most fabulous cheese. It's a goat cheese with lavender and fennel called Purple Haze and is made by Cypress Grove. You can buy it in good supermarkets here. It's expensive but a little of it goes a long way. It sounds like a weird combination but is just delicious. Cypress Grove also makes one called London Fog that is so good, but I haven't seen it lately.
DeleteI love pine nuts, too! I remember the first time I encountered them -- it was in an Italian restaurant. It was one of those food experiences that feels like an explosion opening one's mind anew. I don't buy them often, but when I do it is either for a specific recipe or to use on salads, which I find a great treat.
ReplyDeleteMy mother grew up in Louisiana and all her family is still there. When I was younger, they used to ship us pecans each year, but somewhere over the years that died out. Too bad -- I also love pecans.
Trader Joe's has good and decently priced pecans, and so does Costco. Don't deprive yourself, Susan! They're very good for you, too, although I don't think they rank quite as high on the nutrition scale as walnuts, which I also love.
DeleteInteresting facts about pine nuts Debs. I love all kinds of nuts but I think p-nuts are my fav.
ReplyDeleteAs far as a food obsession I have to say bread especially a good French Baguette from a local bakery.
Now I want a fresh baguette!
DeleteWe are so lucky to have a bakery here that makes wonderful baguettes. I buy them every week, and if we're not going to eat them that day, I cut them in two or three pieces and pop them in the freezer. They reheat beautifully baked in the toaster oven.
DeleteI love all nuts but I have never had pine nuts. I should remedy that asap! I have just this past summer discovered that I have pine cones on the Eastern White Pines I planted a few years ago. Will they contain pine nuts? If so, they are probably very tiny. I've heard that mice like pine cones and I am guessing that is what they are after.
ReplyDeleteThey're probably not edible, Judi. I think the American edible species are mostly found in the southwest. I'm sure the mice like the tiny seeds, though, just like the squirrels love our bitter pecans.
DeleteSo glad to know some of you are also nut nuts! I'm off to the farmer's market, where I'll be looking to see if any of the vendors have local pecans yet. It's harvest season! I'll be back here in a bit!
ReplyDeleteI'm a "nut nut." Since having a tooth extracted a few weeks ago, my go-to nut is Costco cashews (unsalted). I love the salted peanuts (Virginia style) - and look forward to the day I can eat them again. For better or worse, they are my go-to snack.
DeleteI snack on unsalted raw cashews, too, Beth. We are obviously "nut" sisters!
DeleteI love them too! I keep them in the freezer. I also love craisins for salad. Craisins, blue cheese, and pecans on salad With grilled chicken. Cannot do better than that. Xxxxxx but you have to be so careful toasting pine nuts, right? In a fraction of a second— poof, they’re burned.
ReplyDeleteYes, absolutely! I shake the little non stick pan and as soon as they start to toast, take them off!
DeleteTrying to determine if a seed is a nut or a nut a seed seems to me like trying to determine if a tomato is a fruit or a vegetable. If it pleases your taste, does its biological category matter? Elisabeth
ReplyDeleteJust my nerdy biologist side coming out!
DeleteI had forgotten your biologist side…apologies. Elisabeth
DeleteDebbie I love all things Pine Nuts ! My Mom taught me how to toast all nuts to enhance their flavor. Pecans were predominantly the choice in the Deep South as they were what we had and affordable during the Fall harvest just in time for Thanksgiving and Christmas. I was taught to candy pecans , to make pecan pies, to toast pecans and pine nuts with added flaked sea salt for an appetizer. Pecan topping for pumpkin casserole. I didn’t learn about pine nuts until I was in my twenties with a young son and I began to explore recipe’s from cooking shows which eventually led to making a new best friend who loved cooking and baking as much as I did. When I was in high school and home from college I worked for the local catering business. This led to my friend and I starting a catering business. We made baklava , we made salads with pine nuts, pastas with sprinkled pine nuts, quiche with pine nuts and shrimp with pasta and a béchamel sauce sprinkled with pine nuts !
ReplyDeleteThey seamlessly made these dishes stand out and every time at least one of the guest’s would say that they never knew how good pine nuts were or that they existed !
Oh, I love all of these things! Isn't it amazing what a sprinkle of these little nuts can do!
DeleteI do love pine nuts, and honestly, I figured most of them came from Italy, which as where I first encountered them. The more you know...
ReplyDeleteI also adore cultured pecans (remember, I'm also from Alabama!) but I will eat WAY too many of them, so I only have them in the house when I'm going to bake something.
One of my "toss a little bit in and everything tastes better" ingredients is anchovy paste. Yes! I grabbed it one time when I couldn't find fish sauce at my local store and I was cooking Chinese that night. It turned out to work really well as a substitute and I started experimenting with it when I wanted to add a little salt/umami to a dish. The funny thing is, I don't actually like anchovies - but the paste: yum!
I do like anchovies, and I'm with you on the touch of anchovy paste. One of those amazing little bits of cooking magic, and not something anyone will notice unless you tell them.
DeleteAnd, yes, pecans! One of my favorite vendors did have the first pecans at the farmers market this morning. He said their trees must be two hundred years old and I didn't correct him. I don't think it's likely the cultivars would have been planted before the mid 1800s, but I just did a little nerdy history dip and, yes, it is possible that the Spanish colonists were planting cultivars in the 1700s as far north as San Antonio, so who knows! At any rate, the pecans are delicious, and I've already eaten too many!
I love pine nuts. I try to buy the Italian ones every once in a while, even though they cost a fortune. Nuts.com has them, and when I'm in Venice "working," I pick up some from the gastronomic shop, where they also cost a fortune. The supermarkets, I think, only sell the Chinese ones. I once read that some people can be sensitive to the Chinese ones, but since nearly every time I have pine nuts outside of my home they must be the Chinese ones, I guess I dodged that bullet.
ReplyDeleteUntil I did a little research, I didn't know that most pine nuts sold here come from China, Russia, Afganistan, and Korea. I assumed they were Italian or European, but apparently those are much more expensive. I'd love to try the European ones--worth the splurge, I'm sure!
DeletePine nuts, yes! I use them when I make rice, Persian-style.
ReplyDeleteOh, yum! I hadn't thought of that, although I know they are used in a lot of Middle Eastern food.
DeleteAh, Persian rice. So good. We make a sort of mash-up, a sort of faint variation of some Ottolenghi recipe. I use rice, browned onions, saffron, pistachios, and barberries. Drat. I think of this just as we're getting ready to travel to Italy. But I know I can get rice, saffron, and pistachios, so that's something I can make for dinner some night.
DeleteDeborah ~ You keep coming up with wonderful blogs that stir up memories of the five senses ~ visual, hearing, taste, touch and smell. First of all, your choice of using pignolias so many ways other than just toasting them is great. A delicious gourmet selection although those pine nuts can be a bit pricey! The moment you mentioned pine nuts my memory bank stirred up all those wonderful family Thanksgiving gatherings of yesteryear...a beautiful table setting, the scent of freshly-baked apple pies, the many tastes of holiday cooking, laughter, and the hugs. My mother-in-law was always assigned the task of making the turkey stuffing every year. Everyone looked forward to her dressing because she "tweaked" a traditional recipe and made it her own. Chestnut stuffing was always a welcome addition to the Thanksgiving table but when the prep work behind that recipe proved cumbersome for my mother-in-law she started using pine nuts instead.. She would add them to her chopped celery and onion part of the recipe and stir fry everything in butter before linking all the other ingredients together. She also used sautéed ground sirloin instead of sausage to her stuffing. But oh those pine nuts....they truly made a difference in taste. Such a delicious addition to the holiday dressing!
ReplyDeletePine nuts in stuffing/dressing!!! What a wonderful idea! Especially as I'm not all that fond of chestnuts. I like the flavor but not so much the texture. And, thank you, Evelyn, so glad you enjoy the posts. Sometimes they are a little off the wall!
DeleteI love all of the above suggestions for enjoying pine nuts. My husband loves to put them on his toast with peanut butter.
ReplyDeleteAnother great idea. I'm going to try that with my sunflower butter!
DeleteUnless it's pesto I don't believe I've eaten pine nuts. I love dried fruit. My grandfather used to provide us this really cool kit of it every year for Christmas and it was the candy of my youth. I actually enjoy putting raisins on my cottage cheese with a little bit of honey. It's kind of a healthy dessert in my warped little head. It's has protein and a little sweet and I like it. (I also like this on my cottage cheese so I don't judge me.) Dried fruit is really full of sugar, so it may not be great for teeth but I eat it in small amounts.
ReplyDeleteLittle mess up - I also like molasses on my cottage cheese......
DeleteDeana, I love molasses but would never have thought to put on cottage cheese. Thanks for the tip!
DeleteA light drizzle is just perfect for me, Debs.
DeleteBesides pine nuts and pecans, sliced almonds are yummy too, and toast quickly. I also like pomegranate seeds on salads and in yogurt. They are in season now.
ReplyDeleteI love pomegranate seeds, too, but hate the fuss of shelling them--is that the right word? And I don't like the pre-packaged ones because they spoil really quickly.
DeletePine nuts are a staple for me because I frequently make pesto--I keep them in the freezer. However, I haven't been very adventurous with them otherwise. I love all these suggestions everyone has made. Like Susan, I had family in Louisiana, and my father's father used to ship us pecans from his trees, which were twice the size of what I can buy here in Switzerland and tasted ten times better. I still put pecans in my brownies for tradition's sake, but nothing I can buy here will ever compare to those homegrown pecans I ate as a child.
ReplyDeleteI am always so tickled by the Brits, who say "PEE-cans" instead of "puh-kaans." Same with "taco" rhyming with "whacko."
DeleteNelson's Candy Kitchen in Columbia State Park in California's 49er gold country makes wonderful handmade chocolates. The best is nougat dipped in dark chocolate and covered in pine nuts. Dark chocolate and pine nuts - a fabulous combination! They ship.
ReplyDeleteOh my gosh. I probably didn't need to know that:-)
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