Roasting Oregon Hazelnuts

Roasting Oregon hazelnuts for our upcoming Rogue River rafting, kayaking and hiking trips. Yum. Straight from the mid-Willamette Valley’s Chamber family hazelnut orchards.  In this blog, we’ll show you how we roast and prepare our Oregon hazelnuts (also known as filberts) for our Rogue River rafting, kayaking and hiking guests. We serve these before dinner to guests on our Rogue River trips! The photo (above) shows the nuts in raw form.

The photo above shows the nuts after roasting in a 325 degree oven for 30 minutes. The husks are starting to split.

We use a clean tea towel to gently massage the skins off the nuts. This part takes patience but most of the skins will come off. We use the skins for a bit of mulch in our gardens (reuse, recycle!)

Once the skins are mostly off, take the best quality olive oil that you can afford and drizzle the nuts with the oil…not too much.

Next, we like to sprinkle the nut/olive oil mixture with a fine Mediterranean Sea Salt. Actually, any sea salt will do. If you like bigger pieces of salt, you can use a bigger grain sea salt.

Last we sprinkle with a “Garlic Lover’s Garlic” which is all natural and salt free. This is a fantastic product make by Oregon Flavor Rack out of Eugene, Oregon. Check out their website at: http://www.spiceman.com

Once all this is done, we vacuum-seal the nuts and stick them in our freezer until the Rogue River trip begins. YUM-A-LICIOUS!

About the Author: Joy Henkle owns and operates White Water Warehouse (WWW) with her husband, Bob Meister. Ever-interested in making their Oregon Rogue River rafting, kayaking, and hiking trips part of a very special Oregon vacation experience for their guests, Joy writes this blog to educate and inform guests and readers about southern Oregon’s fascinating people, places, foods, and festivals. Questions? Joy can be reached at 1-800-214-0579 or fun@whitewaterwarehouse.com