Hi, I’m Tom Papoutsis. Today we’re making chestnut filling for your holiday turkey. This is the actual filling that’s going to go inside the bird and what we’re going to do; of course we have to start out with our chestnuts. Okay, our chestnuts which can be found various, probably upper in grocery stores , unless you have a chestnut tree outside your house, which actually we have one in the family, that’s where we het the chestnuts, but these little guys to get the skin off them, it can be very difficult. The way that you do this, it’s very simple, very easy; you take and you put this in a pot of boiling water, actually put them in, bring it up to a boil, and when it comes to a boil, just take it off and let it sit for probably about five or ten minutes; that’s enough to soften this up. And what’s going to happen, I’m going to show you how we do this; these have already been boiled, and we’re ready to actually take the skins off of these chestnuts. I’m just going to kind of make a little score in this chestnut and I’m just going to take the tip of ,y knife and I’m going to come down, let’s see if I can get this chestnut to cooperate with me, there we go. And just come down around like that, just enough to get my knife blade in and I’m going to peel that up. Now when I peel this, what’s going to happen is when they’re, now trust me, these have been sitting for a little while, when they’re warm, they’re actually, they’re a little tougher to work with, rough’s a little easier to work with, but now these have actually cooled down a little bit; it gets to be a little bit more difficult. And what you’re going to see is I do this, and they sometimes, they cooperate, sometimes they don’t. But it doesn’t matter if we break this apart, it really doesn’t matter. There we go, that’s a nice one right here. So we peel this out and you will see on this one here is a little brown coating on here, a little skin is left behind. You try to get that coating off, usually if you take them out in the warm, they will come, that will come right off. If you peel these things first what happens is, this skin if you peel them, try to peel them before you actually boil them that skin will stay on there. But what you want to do is boil them first, the skin will come off and then you’re ready to use the chestnuts. Now what we’ve done, I’ve already taken cared a lot of this work here, you can see some of these are tough, this is what you end up with; we have a bowl of already peeled chestnuts and that’s the basis for our filling.
Now, as far as these are concerned, if you take one of these and you peel it without boiling it, you’re going to have that skin left on here just like this; you’re going to see this brown skin on there. What you can do is you can put this with the skin on in the boiling water, in the hot water, let them soak and then that skin will come right off. So you can do it one or two ways, you either have to take this off first or drop this in the hot water, let them sit and then that’ll loosen things up, you can peel this off, just get a knife and kind of break here if you start to peel with it and when they’re hot, like I said they’ll come off very easily. But that’s how we prepare our chestnuts and then when we come back we’re going to start putting things together and this dish is going to go rather quickly; so we’ll come back, we’ll get our stuff ready to go and we’re going to put this chestnut filling together.