It's chestnut season. Apparently? From around October to about April, chestnut vendors set about preparing the little brown nuggets (they're called li zi, 栗子), seeds of the deciduous beech trees in the genus of Castanea, for cracking and consumption.
Never been a huge fan of chestnuts. Chestnuts just seem so... I don't know. Rural? Like I'm meant to chew them open-mouthed, barefoot in the mud, little bits of shell flying everywhere as I loudly make up stories about Boo Radley. This is the city, baby. We eat sexy, modern nuts here, like pistachios. Salted pistachios.
Turns out that was rank, base ignorance.
Chestnuts rule. You just need to know where to find the good ones. There are tons of chestnut vendors Shanghai, from street-front shops to guys selling off the back of trikes. Two well-regarded ones are Li Shang Huang and Hao Hao Chestnut Shop. We consulted a chestnut expert, though, and they recommended Xiang Xiang Chestnut, right by Changshou Lu metro station.
There was no line when we stopped by, but a few people came in every now and then to pick up a bag. No big crowd, but business was good.
Qianxi County in Hebei (河北迁西) is apparently famous for its chestnuts. It's something about the sun and the temperature difference between day and night resulting in higher sugar content.
At Xiang Xiang, they roast their chestnuts in the big oven in the back. The shells stay intact while they roast. According to the owner, that's the whole point. Once the shell is cut open, the chestnut starts drying out and gets hard much faster. The intact-shell ones stay soft, sweet, and fragrant, especially when they're still warm. If you see pre-cut chestnuts, bail. These are not good chestnuts.
And you don't necessarily have to finish the bag while they're hot. The owner says the chestnuts keep well for several days. Just give them a quick blast in the microwave before eating. If you really have too many, you can freeze them for several months and reheat a few at a time. So, yes, buying too many chestnuts is a solvable problem.
I bought like 50rmb worth of chestnuts. That's a lot of nuts. Frankly, a quarter of that would've been plenty of nuts. But I need a representative sample nut size if we were going to figure out the good-meh-boo ratio, visually represented as the :D :) :( ratio.
Chestnuts tend to come out round, half-round, or flat. The round ones are generally considered the best: they're plumper and tend to be sweeter. But the half-round ones are by far the most common, and after eating our way through the bag, the difference wasn't exactly night and day. The round ones were good, sure, but there were plenty of perfectly decent half-rounds in there too.
Final results: Out of 198 chestnuts (well, 195, I ate three on the way back when they were piping hot), we came down to 20 round ones, 139 half-round ones and 36 flat ones. That means for every :D chestnut, we got 6.95 :) chestnuts and 1.8 :( chestnuts.
You can crack them with your fingers by sort of pinching the shell, and it should split right open.
I find the hand-cracking method has a high likelihood of splitting the soft, fleshy bit inside, resulting in an unmanageable, crumbly mess. Nothing worse than a crumbly nut. I prefer to gently gnaw the shell along the north-south axis with my incisors, then delicately remove one half of the dome, like cranial surgery.
Whichever way you do it, have them while they're just barely too hot to hold. That's when they're best, the best argument that chestnuts deserve to be right up there with cashews, almonds, and even salted pistachios.
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Xiang Xiang Chestnut is located at 285 Changshou Lu, near Changde Lu / 长寿路285号, 近常德路.
The shop has been selling chestnuts for more than 30 years. It has moved locations along the way, but has kept going all this time, which is probably a pretty good endorsement in itself.
The shop is open from 7am to 10pm. There's no fixed roasting schedule — according to the owner, it's chestnut season, so they keep roasting as long as people are buying. So there's no need to time your visit around a particular batch. Show up during opening hours and, chances are, there'll be a fresh, hot batch somewhere in the rotation.
Chestnuts are currently 23.80rmb per 500g, with a 10rmb minimum purchase.
