If you want to eat beechnuts, there is basically nothing to say against it. However, you should properly process the mildly toxic seeds before consuming them. We’ll show you how to safely use beechnuts in the kitchen.
Eating Beechnuts: Raw seeds are slightly poisonous
Beechnuts are not only food for wild boar, birds and Co. – we humans can eat them too. In autumn they litter the paths in forests and parks. While other tree fruits such as chestnuts or acorns are particularly popular with children who pick them up for crafts, collecting beechnuts has been somewhat forgotten. You can use the small brown seeds in many ways in the kitchen.
However, it’s best not to eat raw beechnuts because they contain the mildly toxic compound fagin, named after the beech tree’s scientific name. According to the Federal Center for Nutrition, large amounts of this plant toxin can cause abdominal pain. Children in particular should therefore not eat raw beechnuts. If you want to eat the beechnuts safely, you should always process them properly beforehand.
Tip: In order to be able to eat beechnuts, you first have to open the hard shell with a knife. Underneath, the actual seeds appear in the form of small, white kernels. You can eat the brown skin that encloses the seeds without any problems.
Before eating the beechnuts: don’t forget to heat them up!
Before you can eat beechnuts, you have to neutralize the slightly toxic fagin they contain. Fortunately, this is relatively easy: if you heat the seeds, the substance is broken down. To achieve this, you can either
douse with boiling water
or toast them in a pan for a few minutes (similar to pine nuts or hazelnuts)
After that, the fagin is only present in very small amounts in the beechnuts and you can continue to use and eat them without any problems.
This is how you can use beechnuts in the kitchen
Once you have boiled or roasted the beechnuts, you can easily eat them on their own or process them further. With a fat content of 40 percent and their high proportion of protein, minerals, zinc and iron, beechnuts are also very healthy.
Here are some ideas on how to prepare the seeds:
Salad topping: You can use the roasted beechnuts to refine both leaf salads and fruit salads. Simply sprinkle the seeds over the salad like nuts.
Tasty snack to nibble: You can get a tasty and healthy snack for the TV evening if you roast the beechnuts and then roll them in salt.
Ground beechnuts in cakes and bread: You can also grind roasted beechnuts into flour and use it to bake bread, cakes or biscuits, which give them a particularly aromatic taste.
Oil from beechnuts: Producing oil from beechnuts is quite expensive, as you need around seven kilograms of dried beechnuts per liter. However, the effort is worth it because you can store the healthy oil for a very long time and not only cook with it, but also refine salads.
Caution: Beechnuts contain oxalic acid, which is also found in spinach. If you have or have had kidney stones, you should avoid eating foods with a lot of oxalic acid and therefore not eat beechnuts.
Make bread spread from beechnuts
Another delicious way to eat beechnuts is with this spread. You can easily make it from the seeds and a few other ingredients.
Ingredients for beechnut spread:
20 grams of roasted beechnuts
1 bunch of fresh herbs of your choice (e.g. chives or parsley)
500 grams of low-fat quark
2 tbsp olive oil
1 shot of milk
1 pinch of salt
some pepper
1 dash of vinegar (e.g. apple cider vinegar)
How it works:
Chop the roasted beechnuts as small as possible.
Wash the herbs thoroughly, chop them finely and put them in a bowl.
Now add the low-fat quark, the olive oil and the finely chopped beechnuts.
Mix everything together thoroughly, then stir in the milk until it reaches your desired consistency.
Season the spread with salt and pepper and refine it with the vinegar at the end.
