Pacific Palate – Hazelnuts

If you’re looking for the ‘Planking Secrets’ contest page, click here.  This week on Pacific Palate, I talked about hazelnuts, specifically those that come from Canadian Hazelnuts in Agassiz.

The farmer, who was a hazelnut ‘hobby farmer’ up until a few years ago, is Pentti Hanninen, a former Air Canada pilot who purchased a large hazelnut farm and processing plant a few years ago, and is now the single largest hazelnut producer in BC.  At the shop at the plant, you can purchase all kinds of organic hazelnut products, including hazelnut oil and chocolate-hazelnut spread, just to name a couple. 

Canadian Hazelnut:  6682 Loughheed (#7) Highway  604-796-2136

e: canadianhazelnut AT telus.net

The plant and orchard are part of the Agassiz Circle Farm Tour in the District of Kent, and the tour is an easy day trip from Vancouver. But you might want to make a weekend of it and like I did, stay at the Harrison Beach Hotel at Harrison Lake.  Thanks to general manager Matthew Lynam for his great hospitality, and apparently his son is a big fan of mine!

I made a recipe for the show this morning but I wasn’t that happy with it so I won’t reproduce it exactly here.  It was from a book I picked up in Oregon, North America’s largest hazelnut producing region, called Hazelnuts & More Cookbook, by Lucy Gerspacher. 

The recipe I made called for chopped hazelnuts to be combined with chopped green onions, then coated onto fresh oysters that you have already dipped in egg, then flour. Then you fry them in butter and olive oil until crisp.  I don’t think I ground the hazelnuts finely enough, and ended up with quite a mess in the frypan, although the oysters tasted pretty good, I’m not giving this recipe the Pacific Palate Test Kitchen ‘stamp of approval’.

In fact, many of the recipes in the book seem to be of the sort, ‘hmmm, let’s see what classic dishes we can make, then add hazelnuts to at the last minute.’