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Singer and actor Liv Austen has turned a health issue into a passion for cooking, by taking control of every ingredient that goes in to her meals. Every week she shares something she has learned from cooking from scratch, and goes through a recipe she loves, so you can cook alongside the podcast. Cook from scratch - your body will thank you.
I looove hazelnuts. They have incredible flavour and are fantastic as an ingredient or as garnish. The nut comes from the corylus or hazel tree, which grows in many variants around the world - the nuts of all of them are edible.
You can eat hazels raw, roasted, toasted, ground or made into a paste/butter, just like most nuts really! It’s almost unbelievable the flavour these nuts pack naturally. Also like other nuts, they are super nutritious and have a really high calorie content, which is fantastic to utilise for a breakfast before a demanding day, for snacking when out for a hike, or for other strenuous activities when you need to keep your calorie intake up.
About 20 kernels contain around 17g of fat! Isn’t that amazing! Hopefully if you’re reading my posts regularly you know by now that healthy fats are a great thing to get in your diet. If you need a reminder, check out my fat is not the enemy post. They are also quite high in protein, carbs and fibre, as well as thiamine, copper, a large amount of manganese and fair bit of magnesium. We looked at manganese benefits in my recent poppy seed post, so check that out for a refresher on why it’s so amazing.
Hazelnuts are full of wonderful antioxidants. This can help prevent cancer and heart diseases, among other things. For example, it may lower your cholesterol levels, and the combination of a lot of the great nutrients in the nut can help regulate your blood pressure! Note that most of the antioxidants are in the skins, so to get this benefits you want the skins on - it might also be that some of the antioxidants will disappear with roasting, so for the full health benefit here; raw and skin on is the way forward.
Hazelnuts can also lower inflammation in the body, and studies have shown that these changes were noticeable in overweight people after consuming hazelnuts regularly over 12 weeks.
The only possibly negative side to be aware of (apart from a possible allergy of course!) with hazelnuts, is that like many other nuts they contain some phytic acid. This is a natural substance found in lots of foods, and it actually has both good and bad sides to it. People with a normal, varied diet don’t need to be concerned about the minimal amount of phytic acid they get from certain foods (especially as it can also have positive effects!), but if you have a restricted diet that contains a lot of foods (nuts, beans…) that contain phytate, and you are concerned about this, you can soak the nuts in filtered water for a few hours and then drain and rinse them.
Check out my TWO different versions of hazelnut chocolate spread in recipes, here's my newest one:
About 2 years ago, in the first year of The From Scratch Body, I shared a recipe for a chocolate hazelnut spread that I’d made. It was a combination of learning (and yes, stealing) from other people’s recipes, and changing it up a little bit with what I felt worked for me. It is still a delicious recipe and I’m leaving it up for anyone who wants to do a more complex version. However, it is exactly that, more complex. Quite a lot of ingredients and processes. I found myself never really making it - and thought, that doesn’t really fit with the ethos of TFSB, I try to keep ingredient count lower and processes simple so that you can easily keep track of what you’ve put in your body, and also - easily make it in the first place! I kept thinking about it and after becoming more experienced in the kitchen it hit me that this recipe could be so much easier. So I tried a new version. And it had simply 3 ingredients. Hazelnuts make a lovely texture on their own, you literally just have to toast them, peel them and blitz them in the food processor and they will naturally turn in to “butter” (paste). By the way, they may be as delicious with skin on (and that way you also get more antioxidants) so I’ll try that next time and keep you posted on what I think. Or you can try it and let me know what you think!
Secondly, we want the chocolatey flavour, right? But we don’t want to pump lots of sugary chocolate into something we are potentially having for breakfast, or… any other time of day really. Sugar is not a horrible evil thing we have to avoid at all cost, but it’s better to stay on top of exactly how much we really need. Often things we make taste super sweet with way less sugar or sweetener than we think we need. That’s what I wanted to test with this one. So my next ingredient was cocoa. Lovely, healthy cocoa powder which blends easily, but is of course a bit bitter in taste. I mixed together the two and then tried to go carefully with the final ingredient, powdered sugar (also known as icing sugar or frosting sugar). Powdered sugar serves two great purposes in this case, it makes it sweeter of course, but also thickens the mix (you will know this if you’ve ever mixed powdered sugar and water!). I tasted my way to what I found to be the perfect texture and sweetness level, but you can of course experiment with this yourself and go more or less. And that’s it! 3 ingredients, all super long lasting so you can keep this in your cupboard, and pretty decent for your health as well. Give this recipe a go and let me know what you thought!
NOTella - 3 ingredient hazelnut chocolate spread
Makes one large jar
Time: Roasting: 8 mins | Mixing: 5 mins | Total time: Roughly 15 mins
3 cups raw hazelnuts
1/4 cup cocoa powder
1/2 cup powdered (icing/frosting) sugar
Preheat the oven to 180ºC if oven assisted, 190ºC for other ovens (375ºF).
Spread the hazelnuts out on a baking tray and roast them for about 8-10 minutes depending on your oven. Keep an eye on them, nuts can burn fast!
Let the nuts cool and rub them with a clean tea towel, most of the skins will come off quite easily. Some might be tougher and you have to peel by hand. Be zen with it and enjoy the activity if you can (or get some helpers!).
Mix the hazelnuts in a food processor. When they start to turn into a paste, add the cocoa powder. Let it keep blitzing until it has become a proper nut butter consistency, and quite runny. Add the powdered sugar and taste to decide if it is sweet enough in flavour and thick enough in consistency. If you want more sweetness or to make the spread less runny, you can add more powdered sugar. Keep in mind that the spread does thicken a tiny bit as it rests in the cupboard.
Transfer to a jar and keep in your cupboard! All 3 ingredients are quite long lasting, so this should be safe in a cool cupboard for a good while.