peas at a party

One trick for reducing calories and fats in a recipe is to reduce the amount of nuts or seeds. Yes, they are healthy fats (good fats, if you will) but they are energy dense–a lot of calories for a little bit of food. Toasting them to intensify the flavor can make a small amount go further.

How do you do that? It depends. Isn’t that helpful?

The timing and temperature varies with the freshness and temperature and type of nut or seed, sometimes by quite a bit. Here are two methods with some general guidelines.

Place the nuts or seeds that you want to toast in a dry skillet. Heat to medium, shaking the pan often (almost constantly) to turn the seeds or nuts and move them around. This is usually a bit faster than the oven method (below), and since you can use the same pan for additional cooking, it saves on clean up. Be careful with seeds however. Some of them, such as sesame seeds, will jump as they toast.

You can also toast nuts and seeds in the oven. Use any baking pan, no need to spray it. If you are heating the oven for another dish, any temp between 325 and 400 degrees will do. You can even put the pan in the oven before it completely preheats. Check the nuts or seeds often, shaking the pan when you do. They will go from will-these-ever-be-done to burned very quickly. I ususally set the timer for 5 minutes (3 minutes if the oven is pretty hot), but some will take as long as 8-10 minutes.

They are “toasted” when they develop a little color and have a bit of a fragrance.