How To Toast Nuts And Seeds

Hi, my name is Rob Cotton. Welcome to Leith's School of Food and Wine. We're a leading cookery school based in Central London and Chiswick.

Not only do we run a year-long diploma course for professional students and chefs, we also run a range of one-day, one-week and evening class courses to give inspiration or to further recipes for skills at home. I'm going to show you how to toast nuts and seeds. There are two ways of doing it.

You can do it in a frying pan without any oil on the stove or you can do it in the oven. I find it much easier and less chance of burning it by doing it in the oven. For this, you only need to have your oven set between 160 and 180 degrees Celsius, depending on how hot your oven is; whether it's gas or electric.

For an electric oven, definitely 160 degrees. We've got on here some cashew nuts, some pine nuts, and sesame seeds. Make sure they're in an even layer on the baking sheet.

One stack high, they don't want to be on top of each other. Otherwise, they'll brown unevenly. Then, we're going to put them in the oven, on the top third of the oven for a few minutes until they start to brown.

The pine nuts tend to brown a little bit more quickly than the others, but do check on them from time to time. None of these will take more than about five minutes to do, but check every one to two minutes. And I'll come back to check on them in two minutes' time.

The sesame seeds want to take on a light brown color. Every few minutes do shake them and turn them over just to make sure both sides are evenly done. These are fine now, there's a light golden brown color.

Too dark a color and they will be quite bitter. The pine nuts also need to be turned over every now and then to ensure a golden brown color. Just a light golden brown is fine, and then leave them out there to cool down, before putting them into an airtight container.

The cashew nuts also need to be moved around a little bit to toast both sides evenly. Again, a light golden brown color is what we're after. The reason behind toasting nuts and seeds is to give them slightly different textures.

It means they're slightly less fatty, have a little more crunch, and gain that little extra flavor from the browning that they take in the oven. That's how you toast nuts and seeds. .