[HN Gopher] American chestnut
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American chestnut
Author : whicks
Score : 82 points
Date : 2022-02-14 15:54 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (en.wikipedia.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (en.wikipedia.org)
| joe_the_user wrote:
| I'm the Nevada City area.
|
| There are quite a few large chestnut trees here. Last November,
| in my walks around the city, I gathered buckets or pockets full
| of the nuts and wound-up with 4-5 jars worth in my refrigerator.
| I still have half a jar left. They're tasty and easy to cook if
| you quarter them with a serrated knife and fry like potatoes.
|
| Edit: I assume all the trees here were planted or spread from
| planted trees since this California. With each Chestnut tree
| group separate, the ability of blight to spread is somewhat
| limited (but not impossible, still I hope it doesn't).
| pacbard wrote:
| Depending on the type of chestnut, you can "fry" them in a pan
| with the skin still on. I think that that's the "roasted
| chestnuts by the fire" thing in the Christmas song. All you
| have to do is to cut a small slit in the skin (I was told as a
| kid that otherwise a chestnut would explode but I don't know
| how true that is as I have never seen one explode myself).
| After you have scored them, you can just "fry" the chestnuts in
| a pan on a stove or an open flame. The traditional roasting
| pans were made of sheet metal and had holes in them to let the
| heat and flame in to speed up the cooking. I have found that a
| cast-iron pan cooks them well enough even if it's slower. You
| know that the chestnuts are cooked when the skin becomes dry
| and it breaks off easily from the chestnuts. If they are
| undercooked, you will still see the "fuzzy" second skin
| sticking to them and they will taste very bitter. Cooked ones
| will be golden in color and their skins (both the outside one
| and the fuzzy one) will just peel off. My favorite thing is to
| give peeled chestnuts to someone you care about while you eat
| them. They will appreciate it because peeling chestnuts
| inevitably burns your fingers.
|
| Keep in mind that roasting chestnuts is appropriate only for
| some types of chestnuts. the roasting kind have a "square"
| bottom with two long, parallel sides. Wild chestnuts (which
| usually are smaller and have a bulgy side) do not roast well at
| all. Instead, you will want to boil them in salt until they are
| soft. To eat them, you bite and split them in the middle with
| your teeth and "suck" out the pulp. The pulp is somewhat sweet
| and not bad. They are good for a snack as they are easy to
| carry around and last a few days. Roasted chestnuts are only
| good while warm and they become very hard to eat after they
| cool off.
|
| If you can make (or find) some chestnut flour, there are
| recipes for chestnut cake, chestnut pancakes, or fried chestnut
| dumplings. All of those taste very unique and weird (I never
| got used to it) and are way worse than anything "modern" made
| with regular white flour. I really got to eat them when
| visiting "old school", cheap relatives for Christmas. I heard
| that people used to make chestnut bread but I never had that.
| AdamN wrote:
| Chestnuts are also perfect for a Winter risotto. The
| undertones of cooked down shallots with the texture of
| Arborio rice and the flavor of chestnuts are a perfect
| combination.
| klyrs wrote:
| My mom exploded a chestnut once. It sounded like an m-80,
| blew a few of its neighbors off the cookie sheet, and the
| inside of the oven was spattered with fluffy bits of flesh.
| UIUC_06 wrote:
| Personal peeve: the chestnut is not very nutty. And I love nuts
| of almost all sorts.
|
| It's really more like a small potato.
| Alex3917 wrote:
| Also, fwiw basically everything you know about the chestnut
| tree is a lie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TksLHWB9Wbk
| Retric wrote:
| A clarification for those watching the video dominance is
| generally defined in terms of biomass not numbers. The
| American Chestnut could grow quite large, which changes some
| of these comparisons.
| crygin wrote:
| And yet, the chestnut is one of the very few commonly eaten
| botanical nuts (along with the hazelnut and some acorns) --
| nearly all other culinary nuts are otherwise (drupes, seeds,
| legumes, etc).
| xeromal wrote:
| Something weird going on with this tree. I've seen in posted on
| reddit and hackernews all around the past couple of weeks.
|
| Funny how knowledge spreads on the internet.
| MrApathy wrote:
| Stretch explanation: in popular culture the chestnut tree
| served as a major plot point in Richard Power's 2018 novel The
| Overstory, which won several major awards. His most recent
| novel was published in late September, so to some extent his
| name and plots are back in the news.
|
| Stretchier explanation: Frequency illusion, also called Baader-
| Meinhof phenomenon. Per Wikipedia, "a cognitive bias in which,
| after noticing something for the first time, there is a
| tendency to notice it more often, leading someone to believe
| that it has a high frequency of occurrence"
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion
| eminence32 wrote:
| It's probably Baader-Meinhof plus an actual increase in
| frequency, which can happen if people see an interesting link
| on NH and then share it socially on other sites (which then
| gets shared further). Interesting topics seem to be fairly
| "bursty" among various social networks.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Kids today just call it 'viral'
| xeromal wrote:
| Yeah, I've been aware of the demise of the American
| chestnut tree for years now, but I'm just seeing it in
| heightened frequency lately. You're right that social
| networks can get bursty.
| jskrn wrote:
| I'm currently reading the The Overstory and that plot point
| is why I clicked the link!
| nanomonkey wrote:
| I'd suggest that it's due to a lot of folks reading "The
| Overstory" by Richard Powers which talks a bit about the loss
| of the American Chestnut.
| drewzero1 wrote:
| It was mentioned here in a comment[1] the other day on an an
| article about another attempt to recreate the aurochs and
| reintroduce it in Europe.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30327583
|
| I figure, somebody saw that and read a bit more about it (as I
| did) and decided to share.
| FridayoLeary wrote:
| I think it might be very simple. It only takes a couple of
| votes for a story to hit the front page. Those votes could have
| come from people like you who are on both sites. Once something
| hits the front page here, people seem to take it more
| seriously, which is a bit of a shame since so many quality
| submissions just slide off the _new_ page because they fail to
| get the 2 or 3 necessary upvotes.
| Cupertino95014 wrote:
| I don't think anyone's mentioned using the wood for furniture and
| flooring. There's a market for it:
|
| https://www.chestnutfloors.com/
| Wesxdz wrote:
| Darling 58 in your polyculture orchard folks, maybe the US can
| catch up to Chinese chestnut production by the 23rd century.
| jacobian wrote:
| Can you actually buy these? I've wanted to plant them for a
| while, but as far as I can tell they're not actually publicly
| available in any way.
| kleton wrote:
| There are also the closely related Ozark and Allegheny
| chinquapins that have had varied success surviving the blight.
| intuitionist wrote:
| Yes! I've not yet seen a surviving mature American chestnut,
| but there's (what I'm pretty sure is) a C. pumila specimen in a
| churchyard not far from where I live. Fairly cute tree; it
| produces nuts but I have not tried them.
| ortusdux wrote:
| A forester friend found a sizable American chestnut on a survey
| and collected a fair number of seeds. My back yard should be an
| ideal environment for one, so we are planning on trying to
| germinate some this year.
| mabbo wrote:
| Your friend should report the location to the American Chestnut
| Foundation. They can monitor the tree, get it gene sequenced,
| learn more about it.
|
| Every survivor is another set of genes that maybe lead to the
| revival of the species.
| openknot wrote:
| This is fascinating. From a web search, the American Chestnut
| Foundation has a formal process for submitting a sample.
|
| On their request for samples, and why [0]: "Please let us
| know if you think you have found an American chestnut by
| submitting a Tree Locator Form and leaf sample. We are always
| looking to expand our inventory of chestnut trees across the
| native range. [...] "TACF is continuing its breeding program
| to make further gains in disease resistance and forest
| competitiveness, as well as forest health and restoration in
| general."
|
| On how to submit a sample [1]: The foundation has developed a
| procedure where you can submit a twig, leaf, and photos to
| one of their representatives, to verify if the samples came
| from an American chestnut tree.
|
| [0] https://acf.org/resources/faqs/
|
| [1] https://acf.org/resources/identification/
| mabbo wrote:
| I took the lazy route, but you provided all the details I
| ought to have. Thanks! I hope someone reads it and reports
| a tree this way.
| openknot wrote:
| Thanks for sharing! It's likely I never would have
| learned about it otherwise.
| lettergram wrote:
| If you or your friend is selling any, let me know (feel free to
| PM, see my profile).
| dbingham wrote:
| Please tell your friend to report it. If it survived and is
| still producing seeds, then that has a good chance of having
| blight resistant genes! There are a lot of people working
| really hard on bringing the species back, and the benefits
| could be enormous!
| tengbretson wrote:
| If it's really accessible, it might be worth trying to do an
| air layer propagation on it.
| hourislate wrote:
| If this is the same Chestnut Tree that was on our street, it's a
| very messy tree for an urban environment (massive tree). It would
| rain baseball sized pods down on cars parked underneath it. It
| would leave a huge mess on the sidewalks and road every year.
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| Huge messes and baseball-sized pods are characteristic of black
| walnut trees. Chestnuts are much smaller.
| tagoregrtst wrote:
| Unlikely unless you're over 70, 80 years old and these are
| childhood memories.
| mmcgaha wrote:
| Chestnut trees did not die out completely. We had one in the
| middle of the school playground when I was a kid.
| tagoregrtst wrote:
| I know. But that chestnut was probably not an American one.
| zwieback wrote:
| I think those are horse-chestnuts, different tree and not
| directly related to the American chestnut. We used to make
| little figures and animals out of the nuts and some matches in
| kindergarten.
| Turing_Machine wrote:
| Note that horse chestnuts (aka "buckeyes"), besides (as you
| say) being unrelated to standard chestnuts, are toxic. Just
| handling them is not a problem, but eating them is definitely
| bad news. Native Americans used to grind them up and use them
| to stun/kill fish.
| daveslash wrote:
| Very bad news Indeed! Upvote for the PSA word of caution. I
| had a neighbor years ago who used just a few pieces of one
| as garnish on a soup. Made him horribly horribly sick; he
| survived without medical treatment, but attributes that
| mostly to the very tiny amounts he ingested.
| theandrewbailey wrote:
| Not to be confused with buckeyes made from peanut butter
| and chocolate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckeye_candy
| zwieback wrote:
| Wow, I had no idea! I nibbled on them because I thought
| they were the same as the edible ones but that was a one-
| time experiment.
| shealutton2 wrote:
| I am growing a batch of Dunstan chestnuts from seeds that I
| overwintered from https://chestnutridgeofpikecounty.com/. It's
| fun to see how much interest the American Chestnut has garnered
| in the last 20 years. I may have 20-30 seedlings this year and
| plan to plant them around Evanston, IL. Rogue forestry in the
| dark of night.
| zwieback wrote:
| Quite a few of them in Oregon apparently. I didn't realize that
| we're considered more or less blight-free.
| [deleted]
| AutumnCurtain wrote:
| I know of at least one additional American chestnut tree not
| listed in this article, in Oak Glen, CA. I was apple picking
| there and met a wonderful old man from Brittany who made a
| pilgrimage there every year to pick chestnuts for traditional
| dishes. It was sad to hear from him that in his youth chestnuts
| grew in abundance, but today they are few and far between.
|
| The chestnuts themselves are tasty and very fun to gather, with
| their interesting and spiky seed pods.
| dang wrote:
| Related threads. Others?
|
| _The demise and potential revival of the American chestnut_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26441593 - March 2021 (85
| comments)
|
| _The demise and potential revival of the American chestnut_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26363660 - March 2021 (1
| comment)
|
| _Blight wiped out the American chestnut. Scientists are close to
| bringing it back_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21846891
| - Dec 2019 (2 comments)
|
| _American chestnut poised for return to America 's forests_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13855137 - March 2017 (1
| comment)
|
| _American chestnut trees are "technically extinct"_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13478910 - Jan 2017 (120
| comments)
| whicks wrote:
| Sorry Dan, wasn't trying to post duplicative content! Will do a
| better job looking for similar threads in the future.
| srcreigh wrote:
| > If a story has not had significant attention in the last
| year or so, a small number of reposts is ok. Otherwise we
| bury reposts as duplicates.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
| freeqaz wrote:
| Adding to this, if you post a re-post you will be
| redirected to the old thread instead of your new one. So
| you will know that you're reposting!
|
| (I was a little embarrassed when this happens to me at
| first, but I have gotten over it now. It's nice to have a
| computer fact check me. Even if it means my clever titles
| have to be thrown away!)
| dang wrote:
| It's ok! those links to previous threads that I post are just
| for curious archive-combers. When a post is an actual dupe,
| we bury it.
|
| It's true that the American Chestnut had a major thread less
| than a year ago, but the line that srcreigh quoted from the
| FAQ says "or so" to give us a few months' worth of
| interpretive wiggle room.
| lettergram wrote:
| I've been so frustrated they refused to sell me the seeds with
| blight resistance. They wont sell it because it's immune to
| roundup.
| Godel_unicode wrote:
| Is that true? I thought that you couldn't buy Darling 58
| because the petition to sell it to the public hadn't been
| approved by the government.
| jmclnx wrote:
| There was one in the city I grew up in, there was no other trees
| anywhere near it. Once per year chestnuts would be everywhere.
|
| But it died before I became a teenager, me and my friends use to
| love sitting under it. Shows how easily that disease spreads.
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(page generated 2022-02-14 23:00 UTC)