Baking
Chopped Hazelnuts
Beyond chocolate-hazelnut spread, hazelnuts anchor a real range of European baking — ground fine as a partial flour substitute in a Linzer torte or a hazelnut dacquoise, layered into a praline paste with sugar for filling chocolates and cakes, and distilled into Frangelico, an Italian hazelnut liqueur used in both drinks and dessert recipes.
Grocery shelves typically carry both skin-on and pre-skinned (blanched) hazelnuts — pre-skinned costs a bit more but skips the toast-and-rub step needed to remove that bitter brown skin at home, a real time trade-off worth considering for a recipe where the skin's astringency would clash with a delicate flavor.
Toasting hazelnuts at home, whether pre-skinned or not, deepens their flavor considerably — a shallow pan in a moderate oven for roughly 10-15 minutes, checking often, brings out a richer, more rounded nuttiness than raw hazelnuts have on their own, a step worth taking even for pre-skinned nuts.
Hazelnut flour, milled from the whole nut rather than chopped as pieces, is a separate product from what's covered on this page and behaves more like almond flour in baking — a useful distinction if a recipe calls for hazelnut flour specifically rather than chopped hazelnuts folded in as a mix-in or topping.
Hazelnut oil, cold-pressed from the nut, carries a distinctly toasty, nutty flavor and is used more as a finishing oil drizzled over a salad or dessert than as a general cooking oil, similar in role to how a good walnut oil is typically used.
In Austrian and German baking traditions, ground hazelnuts (Haselnussmehl) are a common partial flour substitute in a torte or cookie, contributing both flavor and a denser, moister crumb than wheat flour alone would give — a tradition distinct from, though related to, the more famous Italian gianduja pairing.
Oregon's hazelnut industry has grown considerably since the mid-20th century, aided partly by the state's climate closely resembling Turkey's major hazelnut-growing regions, though it still supplies only a modest fraction of the much larger global Turkish crop.
A hazelnut praline, made by cooking sugar to a caramel and stirring in whole or chopped hazelnuts before it hardens, is a base component in a lot of French and Belgian chocolate confectionery, ground down afterward into a paste used to fill chocolates rather than eaten as a standalone brittle.
Chopped hazelnuts scattered over a green salad alongside a soft cheese and a fruit like pear or fig is a common savory pairing in French and Italian cooking, leaning on the nut's toasty crunch as a textural contrast rather than as part of a dessert or baked good at all.
Frequently asked questions
What are hazelnuts used for besides chocolate-hazelnut spread?
Piedmont, Italy's hazelnut-growing region, is the traditional source behind most of these classic pairings — the region's IGP-certified hazelnuts are specifically prized for the praline and gianduja (hazelnut-chocolate paste) traditions that grew up around a local, abundant nut crop.
Is it worth buying pre-skinned hazelnuts?
For a recipe using a small amount as a garnish or mix-in, skin-on nuts toasted and rubbed in a kitchen towel are simple enough to skip the upcharge — pre-skinned is more worth the extra cost for a larger batch, like a full recipe of praline paste, where the rubbing step becomes genuinely tedious.
Do pre-skinned hazelnuts still need toasting?
Watch them closely either way — hazelnuts go from perfectly toasted to burnt in the same short window as most nuts, and pre-skinned ones in particular can scorch a little faster since they no longer have that thin brown skin acting as a buffer.
Is hazelnut flour the same as chopped hazelnuts?
They're not interchangeable in a recipe — hazelnut flour's fine, powdery texture blends seamlessly into a batter the way chopped hazelnuts, with their distinct crunch and visible pieces, simply can't, and swapping one for the other changes both the texture and the structure of whatever's being baked.