Know Your Chestnuts. Horse or Sweet. Poisonous or edible

[Applause] [Applause] nor your chestnuts and that's quite important I see a lot of videos where people talk about chestnuts and they expect everybody to automatically assume they're talking about the edible sweet chestnut but there are also some poisonous chestnuts the horse chestnut and the book I chestnut we've got examples of all three in these woods here about but it's getting dark now and the examples are north are quite a long way from here but at least the good examples but I'm just going to find some basic examples and we'll have a look at the difference because the sweet chestnut is edible but the horse chestnut and the related book I just not straight off the bat I'm not edible without considerable processing allure the horse chestnut was used as a famine food but it is poisonous so you do have to process it and even then it still might be slightly poisonous so another's a chestnut up this wood line which we're proceeding along so he is a sweet chestnut tree and there you can see the distinctive leaves each one is a distinctive leaf bit like a massive version of a beech leaf an elongated version and it is related to the beach but this far north in the UK unless it's an exceptional summer you never really get to any size they never really have a long enough season to grow the knot inside of the case this is the other chest not the horse chestnut and the chestnuts off this are poisonous and they will have just about all fallen off now because autumn is well and truly upon us there's the empty pods slightly spiky quite often they have bigger spikes than this but this isn't this one is not particularly spiky we'll just had a bit of a bang because we're close to bonfire night where the kids can let off fireworks I think kids or somebody must have picked up all the horse chestnuts or as we used to call them conquers there's one a small example there are short stout spines on the casings but the spines are not really hard enough to stick into you the not as prettily as the sweet chestnut spikes I'm struggling to find the actual conkers besides that one there somebody must have been harvesting them okay well we're just about lost the light here but I've got some better specimens well that one's not better that one's not better all right cancel that but yeah I'm gonna say a better specimens of the conquers but the both of them they're damaged but we can look at the leaf here and this is the leaf all the founds of the leaf one two three four five six seven founds of the leaf with the one stalk they're going on to the branch these are in a sorry state because it is now full-blown autumn but look at that look at that there is the board look at that there is the board for next year already very sticky to protect it from insect damage and the bees collect that sort of stickiness and chew it up a bit and we call it propolis but we're not going to get much here because we've got the camera the foreign camera on its maximum brightness settings and we are rapidly losing the light right but as you can see perhaps down there I adjust the settings to get the sky look at that pink sky pink sky can dive either the sky or the ground but you can't have both I'll explain this camera this is a fawn so more but it's a smartphone but I don't use it as a fawn but the only reason I got this fawn was because of its manual camera settings in both Stills and video so I've got the frame rate on a sixtieth of a second which will be a bit shaky for moving around because there's a say we're now just about lost the light so here we are back at base camp and I've collected the horse chestnut here poisonous and the sweet chestnut here not poisonous edible and there are some similar similarities but some very distinct differences between the two first of all the case of the sweet chestnut is much more spiky and prickly and pig painful than the arse chestnut and it's relative the horse chestnuts relative the book I because the book I has quite a smooth outer casing or husk of pond or whatever you want to call it and you can see why it's curled with a book I because it looks like the eye of a book so the only real connection between that so I think they do have some distant relationship as the genus or species of tree golf but the only real connection is the word chestnut now the poison in the horse chestnut it's common name is esculent but I'll put up the chemical name along the bottom because I'll just make a fool of myself trying to pronounce it but essentially what it does is it thins your blood and destroys your damages your internal organs however I've done some research and in World War two in the Netherlands people were processing these as a famine food so I don't know what that process was whether the toxin is water soluble or whether you can destroy it by heating I don't know but it was used as a famine food in the Second World War in the Netherlands and I'll put a link to the research found on that Britain it's not great it just covers the sort of things that were were eating as famine food in the Second World War and it's not very specific on on how the chestnut was made at all edible so everything has some positive uses though and one of its main positive uses is because of the saponins if that's the right term in the leaves the the juices and the the fruit it can be used as soap if I I've done it before meself I've taken the leaves wet my hands pushed the leaves up in my hands and you get a form of salt and you can use it as as a cleaning agent and you can take the conkers or the chestnuts and you can smash these up and soak them in water and soak them for a day or two and you can use that liquid as a salt to wash your clothes with so as I say everything has its uses so there are quite a few varieties of the horse-chestnut or the aesculus genus aesculus and that includes the horse chestnut and the book I and variations of them right so this is the sweet chestnut then with it's a very prickly husk quite painfully prettily and this is the genus is the cast cast Ania something like that I'll put it at the bottom and this is only very very very distantly related to the horse chestnut but it's much more closely related to the the beach and it hasn't been a bad year for for beechnuts in this area this year and they don't look that dissimilar if you scaled the beach not open mid its hair is a bit prickly err they would look quite similar and in fact this year we are getting a bit of nut in the beach not if I think so see there we're getting some fair sized and edible pitch knots this year so if you didn't know the difference between the two you could get them confused because they do look fairly similar they have a light patch on them and a darker patch and the horse-chestnuts can have a flat side on them usually this doesn't have a flat side on it but usually the sweet chestnut does have one flat side on it but not always but once you've seen the two and have been told which is which it's quite easy to tell the difference the sweet chestnut it on the opposite to the light side it comes up to a little point and it's a little hairy point and a lot of the hairs will be knocked off these these sweet chestnuts but you can't see that hairy point yeah so once you know the difference you're not going to get a mixed up right so because we very rarely get a good harvest of sweet chestnuts in this area all I do know whether a plenty of large sweet chestnut trees or occasionally when we do get a good harvest about every 5 or 7 years then I can pick plenty of these up off about this size well that's not the case this year if I lived further down south they'll probably have very good a very good harvest this year down south but it's not economical for me to go all the way down the South of England so I've just gone to the supermarket bought these and these chestnuts in fact came from Italy there's a lot of actual farms chestnuts are farmed found for the sweet chestnuts and farmed for the the wood of the chestnut tree as well because like New York which the chestnut is also related to the chestnut ward has a lot of tannin in it so it resists pests and rot very well so it's very good very good building material so that covers the differences of the two then so what we're gonna do now is we're gonna go outside when the when it stops raining we're gonna vote outside if it doesn't stop rayon enough to do it on the stove but I'd rather do it outside and we're gonna cook a few roast a few sweet chestnut we might just roast one or two haast yes not as well just to use to see what happens but bear in mind they are poisonous so we won't be in these ones we will be eating these ones right now sometimes when you're losing the light everything's wet and you're in a bit of a rush you just want to get a fire started so in my little fire kit what I have is a little container of paraffin so we'll spray that on the it's not stint ourselves we'll spray that on the cattails I've put in there and then is that one that one's not all and that one's being all well he was one of these military store matches to like the capsule cattails are blooming dangerous the trick is not to smother the flame let the flame rise let all the gases rise because it's the gases that are doing the work not the pieces of wood put the gases that come in from the ward so they've got a burning you need them gases to mix with oxygen right so let's get the chestnuts right so when we get a few calls what I'm going to do is I'm just going to put them in this baking pan whose very important first to cut the chestnuts just you can do one of what you can do you can do it any way you want would just try not to cut your fingers so what I'm gonna do you can put them down on the flat if the chestnut has got a flat put it down on the flat bang on the flat and you can score you can put an X in the in the shell put an X in the shell or you can cut all the way around the outside of the shell then you're doing this for two reasons one to stop them exploded and two to make it easy to take the skin off I've actually sucked these because I'm at the end of the day I'm trying to steam steam Kauffman boys it cut through this shell just be careful this is a good good opportunity to cut your fingers and use your first-aid kit so just be careful obviously gonna need a stick here there's two things this what it gives the smoke somewhere to rise up and another it reflects a lot of a lot of hate I'm using my Manta car non-locking legal carry knife for this exercise right now I need to leave the calls little put a bit more wood on there let it burn down I don't want to leave it too long because it's starting to get dark now so I'll put a bit bar on I've got a little job to do chop a bush down in the front gap and then I'll get back to you two very handy things when you're walking about with fires gloves these have got leather pads on and an axe like this fire is not as I would like it for baking on port we don't always have the advantage of time so I'm just going to go ahead and back these 200 degrees C for 15 to 20 minutes or until the outer casings become partially carbonized it's getting a bit ferocious because I've just put a bit of fat wood in there where I cook them you can see them opening up splitting open as the insides either the insides get fatter or the outsides get smaller but one right in the center of the frame now right in the center of the frame that's actually a concur and that's all you know what it's all you know just like the chestnuts are off steam coming off you don't still gonna need gloves as well to handle them because they're going to be hot when they come over there ordinarily I would cook on course because that would give you a much more controlled heat whereas this way you got flame jumping all over the place you're not you haven't got so much control of the heat but life's not perfect we'll there we go so that's what happens that's that's what happens that's what happens when you don't put a hole in them you get a little explosion and you get you get stop jumping about all over the place and in fact it's knocked one of the chestnuts out as well and I that was the conquer we put in by the way I was one of the conquerors but I put in without splitting right let's stick one of the chestnuts out and see where we are I don't know whether you're gonna see this or spit hot it's it blew me not so that's one of the chestnuts I've just taken out you can see the splits open door so I'm just gonna de shell it these shelling them is a fairly easy process but the the shell is nice and crisp and comes off easily they have got a brown-skinned under that shell and you want to get that brown skin off because that brown skin will have a lot of tannin in it and it's steaming under there so I think they all want to come off now you could put a bit of butter or something on it a bit of season bought them a bit well that's it you can see it's a little bit scorched quite firm and want to take them all off no okay well we've lost the light to such an extent I've had to go to manual focus so in a nutshell then that's knowing your chestnuts how to identify them and how not to cook them although they are quite edible if you around the campfire of an evening with a couple of glasses of wine you're not going to complain about feel a little burnt you can just you know if you don't want to risk burning them as I and burning them and as I have burned them you can't just boil them and that's probably the safest way of doing it is just to put them in boiling water I would still split them and just put them in boiling water but all that's incinerated that one right so that concludes this episode and I'll catch you in a week Ursula

Channel: Grasshopper Outdoors

Views: 9,112

Rating: 4.7763977 out of 5

Keywords: Grasshopper Outdoors, Bushcraft, Survival, Outdoors, Self Reliance, Independence, Self sufficiency, Knife, Buckeye, Horse Chestnut, Sweet Chestnut, Roast Chestnuts, Chestnusts, Castanea, Aesculus, Esculin, Hydroxycoumarin Glycoside, Husk, Famine Food, Famine Foods, Manticore Knives

Id: gHsqGOws4jI

Length: 29min 32sec (1772 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 17 2019