In the kitchen
In general, hazelnuts taste best when toasted or roasted. They play a major role in European desserts, baking and confectionery and work well with chocolate, toffee or caramel, cream, meringue, orange and plums. Cake recipes requiring ground almonds can also be made with ground hazelnuts.

There are also many savoury uses. Sprinkle them over soups, salads, and steamed green vegetables. Try them in stuffings for meals of chicken, game birds or ham. They can be chopped and combined with melted butter to serve with fish and shellfish, especially trout, or used in Mediterranean sauces such as tarator and romesco. Blending roasted hazels with a little oil in a food processor produces a good alternative to peanut butter.

Varieties
Cob nuts are a rounded variety of hazelnut with short husks. Filberts are a variety that tends to be longer and covered completely by the husks (although in the United States all cultivated hazelnuts are called filberts). Kentish cobs are actually filberts.

Preparation
The brown skin of hazelnuts is extremely hard to remove when the nuts are raw. To deal with this, roast the nuts for 10 minutes at 180C/gas 4, then remove them from the oven, wrap them in a textured tea towel, and when they are cool enough to handle, rub the skins off using the tea towel.

Alternatively, if you don't want a toasted flavour, the nuts can be blanched in boiling water and cooled before rubbing off the skins. Remember that ground hazelnuts have a high fat content and should be used quickly once the packet is opened; buy them in small amounts only.