I grow just three filbert trees in my front garden. So far, only one is a decent producer. This past warm summer was good to this one tree and now I have a huge bowl of nuts that I need to roast.
I plan to use Jan Roberts-Dominguez’s roasting instructions (which you will find in her column today) and hope to distribute them as Christmas stocking stuffers.
Those of us of a certain age who grew up here remember the filbert orchards of Western Washington. They are now mostly gone.
In Oregon’s Willamette Valley, the same sort of nut is grown in abundance, but the orchardists there go with the name “hazelnut.” I asked Jan to tell me the difference between filberts and hazelnuts.
Many years ago, she said, the nuts were called filberts throughout the Pacific Northwest.
“And, of course, most growers still call them filberts,” Jan said. “The joke has always been ‘we grow filberts, but we sell hazelnuts.’ ”
Washington state used to be a much larger producer of filberts before the orchards were affected by blight, she said.
“It pretty much wiped them out.”
Oregon State University agricultural scientists in Corvallis (where Jan lives) spent 40 years developing blight-resistant varieties, and it paid off.
“We now produce 99.9 percent of the domestic crop here in the Willamette Valley,” Jan said. “But as an industry, it was difficult for growers to sell filberts on the world market. Everywhere else throughout Europe and China, for example, they are known as hazelnuts. Growers and the industry folk finally caved in back in the 1980s and asked people, including us food writers, to please call them hazelnuts.”
I told Jan about my nut harvest. She insisted that since I am now a “grower” that I needed a copy of her 2010 cookbook, “Oregon Hazelnut Country.”
It came in the mail last week. A great book highlighting all sorts of Northwest cuisine, it is filled with filbert/hazelnut recipes such as the one for hazelnut spread in Jan’s column today.
The book is available for just $15 from the Oregon Hazelnut Marketing Board at www.oregonhazelnuts.org/cookbook.
I plan to keep on calling them filberts, and Jan told me that was just fine.
Gale Fiege: 425-339-3427; gfiege@heraldnet.com. Twitter: @galefiege.
Talk to us
> Give us your news tips.
> Send us a letter to the editor.
> More Herald contact information.
