Chestnut flour cake with persimmons and buttermilk

This chestnut flour cake with persimmons and buttermilk is gluten-free and can be made with no added sugar. Naturally sweet and nutty, it makes a great healthy breakfast or dessert! 

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Chestnuts: a classic ingredient

Various species of chestnuts have been a staple food crop for thousands of years throughout Asia, Europe, and North America. However, due to the functional extinction of native North American chestnuts in the 1900s due to imported chestnut blight, chestnuts are a relative culinary rarity here in the US today.   

Since we grow blight-resistant hybrid Chinese chestnuts (Castanea mollissima), we get lots of opportunities to use chestnuts in the kitchen. Our trees are fairly young, but they still produce loads of nuts each fall.

See: Guide to growing organic chestnuts

Chestnut flour: NOT like wheat flour

The macronutrient profile of chestnuts is much different than popular nuts like almonds, pecans, walnuts, etc. Those other nuts are high in fats and proteins, whereas chestnuts are high in complex carbohydrates with relatively little protein or fat. Hence their nickname “bread of the woods.” 

Chestnuts’ sweet nutty flavor and high carbohydrate profile means you use them differently than most nuts in the kitchen. Our favorite thing to do with our excess nuts is grind them into chestnut flour.

Chestnut flour doesn’t cook like wheat flour. That’s because it has no gluten so it doesn’t bind and stick together. Also, it’s relatively heavy so it doesn’t readily form air pockets or rise.    

Chestnut flour cake

Many traditional European chestnut cakes such as Italian castagnaccio are delicious, but extremely dense. However, we wanted to create a chestnut cake that was lighter and fluffier — and something that could just as easily be a healthy breakfast as it could a dessert. 

Thus, in this chestnut cake recipe we use buttermilk which reacts strongly with the baking soda to give the cake more lift. To boost sweetness without adding refined sugar, we add a very ripe pureed Asian persimmon from our Ichi Ki Kei Jiro Japanese persimmon tree. (You could also use American persimmon pulp puree, but it’s a little heavier with a lower water content.) 

We hope you’re as happy with the resulting chestnut flour persimmon buttermilk cake recipe as we are! 

Chestnut cake notes and tips 

Please carefully read the following notes and tips before attempting to make this chestnut cake recipe, otherwise it might not turn out as expected:

1. Chestnut flour differences

As mentioned, we use homemade chestnut flour made from our hybrid Chinese chestnuts. (See: How to make chestnut flour.) However, you can also buy quality organic chestnut flour online.

There are likely subtle cooking differences between flour made from European versus Asian chestnuts, not to mention the various hybrids. And if you make your own chestnut flour like we do, your homemade flour is probably not going to be as light and finely ground as commercial chestnut flours unless you happen to have a flour mill. 

What to do? We recommend using a kitchen scale to ensure you use the exact same quantity of chestnut flour as the recipe calls for: 172 grams.

172 grams of chestnut flour measured at about 1 1/4 cups with our homemade flour. However, 1 1/4 cups of commercial chestnut flour would likely weigh less. 

2. Sift your chestnut flour, especially if it’s homemade. 

When baking with our chestnut flour, we always pre-sift it before beginning a recipe. This way, any larger bits can be removed so you don’t end up with unpleasantly hard chunks.  

Once the larger chestnut bits are sifted out, you can either set them aside for use in recipes where they’ll work fine (like chestnut breakfast porridge), or you can grind them into finer flour with a mortar and pestle to be used immediately. 

3. Asian persimmons – and stages of ripeness

There’s one soft, very ripe Asian persimmon pureed and baked into this chestnut cake recipe. (We used skin and all.)

If you’re a precise baker like we are, use 148 grams or 5.2 ounces of persimmon puree. 

If you want to also use pan-roasted persimmons to dress up the dish when plating, use firmer, less ripe Asian persimmons. More on that below!

Related read: How to store Asian persimmons and use them at various stages of ripeness.

4. Batter consistency and sweetness

Once all your ingredients are combined, you’ll have a very wet batter similar to breakfast bread or cornbread batter. This is especially true if you’re using homemade chestnut flour that isn’t ground to a super-fine consistency wherein it immediately absorbs the moisture.  

Also note that our base recipe is NOT a sweet cake – at least not by American standards. Chestnuts are naturally sweet, as are persimmons, but there’s no added sugar. 

If you want a sweeter cake, add 2-3 tablespoons of sugar. If possible, our recommendation would be to use maple sugar, rather than cane sugar.

5. Type of pan and resulting bake times

We love to bake in our antique cast iron pans. For this recipe we use a Wagner #8, which is actually 9″ wide x 2″ deep with sloping sides. Our chestnut cake was perfectly baked at 30 minutes on 350°F (177°C).

Cast iron pans are thick and dense, so a chestnut cake will cook a bit slower in a cast iron pan versus standard aluminum cake pans. If you don’t have a 9″ cast iron pan, use a standard 9″ cake pan, but note that your cake may finish baking a bit faster at around 25 minutes. 

6. Serving… Sweet or not? Pan-roasted persimmons? 

Once your chestnut cake is out of the oven, let it cool in the pan on a cooling rack for at least 30 minutes before attempting to cut and serve it. 

We actually think the cake tastes better after it’s rested for a half day or more, then been reheated. 15-20 seconds per slice in the microwave suffices. 

We also like to serve this recipe with a side of pan-roasted Asian persimmons. Peel and slice firm but ripe (not soft) Asian persimmons exposing the beautiful internal star pattern inside (vestigial seed pockets). One persimmon produces about 5 slices.  

Note: some Asian persimmon varieties are seedless, some are partially seedless, and others have seeds. Ours are usually seedless but we’ll occasionally find a seed.

Sauté the sliced persimmons in butter on a skillet over medium heat for about 3-5 minutes on each side, or until lightly browned. Once plated, you can decide whether you want to sweeten things up more with a drizzle of maple syrup, a dusting of powdered sugar, etc. 

As noted in the recipe card below, you can also add sugar when making the batter to produce a sweeter cake. 

Recipe: Chestnut flour cake with persimmons & buttermilk

Let us know how your chestnut persimmon buttermilk cake turns out! 

KIGI,

Other chest nutty articles you’ll want to chew on:

• How to grow and use chestnuts
• How to make roasted chestnuts on a stovetop | Web story video
• Chestnut crabapple mash
• Recipe: Spruce needled-infused chestnut spread or chestnut mash
• Recipe: Chestnut flour crepes with beautyberry whipped cream
• Recipe: chestnut porridge, a simple & delicious sugar-free breakfast
• How to make chestnut flour
• One-pot roasted chicken with chestnuts and crabapples
• Chestnut and shiitake mushroom soup