Production Practices and Quality Assessment of Food Crops. Vol. 1

154 S. Pereira-Lorenzo and A. M. Ramos-Cabrer
10.2. Processing
Figure 27. Heaps of nuts into the burs in La Palma, Canary Islands.
In Northern Spain, trees of the largest orchards belong to a number of different
owners as it was reported in other chestnut areas of Italy (Bruneton, 1984). In
these areas, each family harvest their production and they sell to a collector ‘jobber’
who accumulates quite big amounts of chestnuts in a warehouse. Jobbers will disinfect
the insects, wash and brush the nuts and, in most of the cases, they classify
chestnuts in different categories: over 4-cm width, between 3 and 4 cm and less than
3 cm. After that, nuts are packed in bags of 50 kg, 5 kg, 1 kg, or 250 g, depending
on the market. They also send to industries in big pallets.
In Southern Spain as in France and Italy, growers are grouped into associations
to prepare chestnut after harvesting. These associations have better installations
where ‘curature’ or washing in hot water to eliminate diseases and insects is the
best and healthy way to prepare chestnut. The nuts are graded and packed for
marketing.
Chestnut industries buy from jobbers or associations to transform the chestnuts.
Main transformation is peeling. Nuts can be peeled burning or steaming them.
Second method is considered more appropriate to nuts destined to ‘marron glace’.
Most of the peeled nuts are frozen. After, they can be sold in big pallets to
other industries or packed in small bags. Frozen nuts can be later transformed or
cooked. Biggest nuts are used for the production of ‘marron glace’; peeled nuts
are boiled in high concentrated solution of sugar until it replaces intracellular content.