We had some leftover puff pastry from last Christmas in deep freeze, so we decided to thaw it and experiment with some turnovers. I guess I should have remembered the semi-disastrous jam in pan de sal experiments of only a few months ago, but I didn’t and thankfully, I didn’t have exploding turnovers… We still have several bottles of mangosteen jam that were slightly overcooked and therefore a little denser than the typical jam, but I thought they might make a nice filling for turnovers if thinned with some brandy and mixed in with freshly roasted cashew nuts.

To make the filling, I emptied an 8oz jar of mangosteen jam into a saucepan and added about a tablespoon of water and two tablespoons of brandy. Place this over low heat and watch in liquify and mix it with a spoon. Add about a cup or less of freshly roasted cashew nuts and take them off the flames. It will get rather sticky as it cools. If the jam looks too thick, add a little more water or brandy before you add the nuts.

Cut your puff pastry into roughly 4×4 inch squares (or whatever dimensions will make best use of your sheet of puff pastry. Fill the center with a tablespoon or so of the jam/nut mixture and brush some egg wash on the lip of the puff pastry to help it seal better. Fold over one corner of the puff pastry to create a nice triangular shape. Crimp the edges with your fingers or with a the tines of a fork. Brush tops with egg wash.

Place these on a baking sheet lined with a silpat mat or baking paper and place in a hot 375F oven until the pastries are golden brown.

Transfer to a cooling rack and serve warm or at room temperature. Some of the jam did manage to escape and make a bit of a mess on the silpat mat. But for the most part, the jam stayed inside the pastries and made for a rather appealing dessert. Just the right amount of sweetness in the flavorful mangosteen jam, and the substantial crunch of nuts. Flaky pastry made it all seem so luxurious. In our humid weather, this doesn’t last more than 6-10 hours before getting a bit limp… but they were good soon after coming out of the oven!

The post Mangosteen Jam & Cashew Nut Turnovers a la Marketman appeared first on Market Manila.

I am definitely getting a bit more ornery as I get older. Take for example a simple breakfast at a fabulous five star hotel on a fabulous beach somewhere in the Philippine archipelago — the toast arrives accompanied by by some butter — and more often than not, seriously crappy bottled jam. I won’t even get into grocery brand names, which they often are, and the fact that they feature ingredients that aren’t even typically grown here. Over the years, this has been a recurring theme while having breakfast at several good to excellent hotels around the Philippines. Why are we so ashamed of our own produce? Why can’t we serve something local? And since you eat so little jam or butter with your toast, does it really matter that local, artisanally produced preserves are more expensive than commercial brands? It riles me even more when on trips to places like Cambodia or Bali, local hotels offer up an often stunning array of local preserves alongside more typical marmalade and jellies. One such hotel served us chico jam a couple of years ago, a wonderful revelation.

So enough with the minor rant. Here is something that should blow your socks off on many fronts. A wonderful use of a locally available ingredient. Superb quality. Simple preparation. Far more healthy than processed alternatives. Absolutely delicious. A cashew butter made with homemade guava jelly (instead of sugar or honey). In the photos here, it is topped with a teaspoon of amber guava jelly, a feast for the eyes and stomach.

Start off with a cup of plain, freshly roasted cashew nuts. I used part of the stash that we made here, harvested by hand in Northern Palawan, roasted in our home oven and stored in glass jars until the eureka butter moment occurred. Put the cashews in a heavy duty blender, I use a Waring Pro blender — my favorite, or alternatively in a food processer and blitz it until a fine crumb. Add a pinch of salt (not too much, you can add more later), and carefully drizzle in approximately 2-2.5 tablespoons of neutral oil such as canola oil. Add a teaspoon or two of guava jelly (or honey) and blitz until mixed well and you have a grainy, creamy cashew butter. Taste it and adjust salt or sweetness to your liking. Add a bit more oil if you want it to have a “looser” consistency, but I like it thick and just barely spreadable…

Place in a clean jar and store in your refrigerator. It should last several months, but I doubt it if you have good bread or crackers around often… This is a slightly more subtle nut butter than say peanut or hazelnut or pecan butters, but it is absolutely delicious. I stretched diet rules and had two WASA crackers spread with kasoy butter and some homemade guava jelly on top with a large cup of tea. Yum.

This recipe will yield slightly less than a half cup of cashew butter. You can double or triple the recipe easily as long as you have a good blender or food processor. It’s a bit expensive compared with say, peanut butter, but on a per serving basis, a luxury most people can certainly justify. It is so satisfying to create simple, delicious and local ingredients such as this one. And yes, it ticks me off that more people don’t do it more often. :)

The kasoy butter was also terrific on hot pan de salt with more guava jelly. It would probably work in a puff pastry as well. The possibilities are intriguing…

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Hahaha. I couldn’t resist that title for the post. We were in Palawan recently and we visited our “suki” cashew nut manufacturer/wholesaler/retailer and managed to convince them to sell us a kilo of freshly shelled, not even sun-dried, and certainly not dry-roasted or deep fried cashew nuts. While we also love their adobo and garlic roasted cashew nuts, I wanted an unflavored nut to play with in the kitchen. At PHP500-600 a kilo, these are pricier than say imported cashews from Vietnam or India, but they are proudly locally grown, totally organic, hand-collected and possess a wonderful naturally sweet flavor.

Back in Manila, I turned the oven on to say 350-375F and spread the nuts on a baking pan and put them in the oven for say 5-10 minutes before tossing and turning the nuts around. You MUST keep an eye on them as they can burn easily. Once the edges are slightly golden brown and an amazing aroma is escaping from your oven, remove the nuts and immediately remove them from the hot pan onto another pan or plate to cool. Simple as that. We didn’t bother to add salt or any other flavorings.

Once the nuts cooled, they became nice and crisp and possessed a clean flavor, with a hint of sweetness. Place them in an airtight container and leave them on your kitchen counter in plain sight. You will be tempted to have a few every single time you enter your kitchen. Totally addictive, fairly healthy and brilliant in their unadorned form. A kilo’s worth rarely lasts more than two weeks in our household. Use them in cookies, sans rivals and other desserts or even in savory dishes like Chinese stir-fries with cashews… So the next time you are visiting a province with nuts… cashews, peanuts or pili nuts… bring some home to roast on your own.

P.S. Depending on which mall you might buy these retail, roasted/flavored cashew nuts can range from about PHP700-1,200 per kilo. The cheaper ones tend to be imported and bulk-purchased and were likely cooked months ago… while some of the premium ones like whole cashews from American brands (that source them in India) are HEAVILY processed and nearly immersed in salt and probably lots of other preservatives for them to maintain a lengthy shelf life.

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The family was back in Coron/Culion a couple of weeks ago for a two night visit, and it just happened to be the height of kasoy season again. I have written about Kasoy before, in posts I link at the bottom of this post, so I won’t get into repeating information from earlier posts. But I will show you a few more photos that clearly show the progression of the fruit from flower to harvest…

Here a really young speciment of fruit and the oddly externally attached encased nut.

A couple of different sizes of fruit on the tree, and other ungerminated? flowers in the bunch. The fruit goes from a light green to a ripened yellow or yellow orange.

We managed to gain an invitation to someone’s backyard on the outskirts of town where they had several dozen kasoy or cashew trees, and I was able to harvest a few with the aid of a really long pole with a net basket at one end of it.

The trees were chock-full of fruit and it was the first time the teen got to see them so close up…

Stay tuned for a few interesting uses for freshly picked cashew nuts… If you want to read previous posts on cashews, here is a list:

Fresh Kasoy / Cashew Fruit (Part I)
Kasoy / Cashew Nuts (Part II)
Lita Escarda’s Wonderful Cashew Nuts – This post definitely worth a read
Whole Roasted Palawan Cashew Nuts
Cashew Fruit “Prune” Muffins
Banana, Cashew Nut & Dried Mango Cake
Cashew Butter and Prunes

The post Fresh Kasoy / Cashews appeared first on Market Manila.

Never quibble about the price of your cashew nuts. NEVER. If you only knew how much time and effort is required to process these delicious morsels, you wouldn’t be so quick to drive a hard bargain, feeling smug that you had managed to claw back some 10 or 20 pesos from the vendor’s asking price. Abundant in Vietnam, India and other parts of the world, cashew nuts grown and processed in the Philippines are a dying industry. The season is short, the work to gather the nuts tedious, and the processing, as I describe in this post, is extremely labor-intensive. The more I learn about the food that I eat, the more I am in awe of the many folks who toil to produce it.

The cashew fruit season in Palawan had just reached its peak a week or two before we arrived in Coron. If you are curious about cashew fruit, check out this previous post. Once the cashew apple or fruit is removed, the greyish brown nuts are dried in the hot sun for a couple of days (photo above), partially to remove the effects of the painful acid that is contained in the fruit or nut casing. The cashew nuts for sale in Coron should have been amongst the freshest for sale in the Philippines, and we intended to bring home several kilos worth. So off to find one of the largest retailers in town, Lita Escarda’s store “Coron Harvest” on the main road, towards the large passenger pier. The store was relatively large, but stocks on display were limited and I think they were a bit surprised that we wanted to buy by the kilo, rather than the typical small 100g or so “snack packs”. After some pleasant conversation, Mrs. Marketman somehow obtained an invitation to the “back of the house” or the store’s factory, to see exactly how the nuts were processed. We were thrilled. Ms. Escarda explained that the last group she had allowed into the inner sanctum was a Taiwanese film crew a few years back. We felt privileged to be accorded the opportunity to observe…

The sun toasted nuts are split in half by hand, using this special contraption…

…notice how this lady does not wear gloves, and the sticky sap/tar/fluids from the fresh nuts stains her fingertips.

Each nut is carefully placed under the “knife” and quickly split…

…the two halves flying on either side of the knife…

…dropping below into a large can…

…as the lady reaches for another nut to begin the process all over again. An expert splitter, this lady was doing one nut every 3 or 4 seconds!

The nuts are then spread out on spacious tables and the nut meats are carefully extracted from the shells. This is a DELICATE process, as a premium is place on perfect half moons or half nuts. Damaged nuts fall into a less desirable nutty category.

This specialized tool is used to pry the half nuts out of the shells. And workers are paid PHP15 per KILO of peeled nuts. OMG, in one whole day, I do NOT think I would be able to extract one kilo of perfect half nuts.

And notice how their fingers are wrapped in bandages so that the acids in the nut shells don’t burn their fingers while they are extracting the cashews!

The cleaned nut meats are then sorted by size and perfection, and dried in shallow baskets under the intense summer sun. That’s Mrs. Escarda herself, showing us her wares.

The drying process removes some of the “itchiness” that some folks experience when eating cashew nuts, a result of residual acids from the shells. The dried nuts are then portioned by weight/volume in these nice woven baskets, ready to be fried in hot fat.

A huge kawali or pan sits over a raging wooden fire, and the nuts are deep fried for several minutes…

…constantly being stirred by a young man who watches carefully for any signs of overcooking the nuts. Sometimes the nuts are flavored with garlic and later salt, other times the fried nuts are treated to a coating of caramelized sugar…

Asked how long the cooking process took… they answered “until it looked right”. Don’t you love it?

The guy dons some gloves, effortlessly lifts the massive pan off the intense flames and strains the freshly cooked nuts through a special screen sieve. The fat is re-used for frying another batch of cashews.

The gleaming nuts are allowed to cool and sent to the front of the house to be weighed and packed.

Here, a batch of caramel coated cashews (the bits and pieces included) are carefully apportioned and weighed.

Ready for sale to all and sundry that drop by. We purchased several packs of adobo flavored nuts, garlic nuts, caramelized nuts and since I wanted several kilos of unflavored and unfried nuts, Mrs. Escarda asked us to return later that day while she set aside two kilos of simply sun-dried nuts. I wanted them in this form for baked goods. We picked up two kilos for PHP1,000 later the same day. Their normal asking price is PHP600 a kilo for fried and salted nuts. And now that you know what went into preparing them, don’t bargain. An amazing hour spent with a real gem of a person involved in food production.

Lita Escarda
Coron Harvest
National Road, Coron
Near the Passenger Ship Port
Cellphone 09072978507

The post Lita Escarda’s Wonderful Cashew Nuts appeared first on Market Manila.

On a late afternoon visit to the Coron public market, we noticed this lady selling what looked like whole cashew kernels for sale, with burnished “skins” still on. There are several ways to cook and extract cashew nuts (and/or extract and cook cashews) from their hard shells. Whole cashew kernels are an unusual sight in the Philippines, as most cashews are split before they are processed, so I was intrigued. The vendor said these cashews had been roasted whole in their hard shells, then the whole nuts extracted, with skins still on. The nuts had been roasted just hours before. We bought several bags and took them back to our hotel.

We were fortunate that the cashew season had peaked just 2-3 weeks before we arrived in Coron, so everything on offer was definitely fresh, it was just a choice between roasted or fried or simply dried cashew nuts…

Peeling the papery skins were not so easy, and bits were charred and burned.

These nuts were pretty good, but the flavor was smoky, in a more unpleasant than pleasant manner. I wondered if roasting and burning the thick shells, notoriously laced with a toxic acid, transfered some off flavors to the nuts. Also, while it was definitely healthier without added fat, I just wasn’t convinced these were the best choice of all available cashews…

Having said that, we still managed to eat several packages of the roasted cashews with the help of some beer. :)

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