Chili Crisp Candied Nuts and Viet-Spiced Petit Palmiers

Low-Lift Recipes to Combat the Holiday Blahs

As someone who thinks nearly 24/7 about food and aims to inspire you to cook and explore, allow me to be honest in saying that I’m tired. It’s been one of heck of a year and I’m feeling borderline spent. How about you?

With all of life’s ups and downs, it can be hard to soldier on into a jolly holiday season. I have a number of coping mechanisms that include daily yoga and meditation.

Following my father’s passing last December, I’ve frequently meditated on grief. Grief comes in waves, as my go-to guided meditation says. I’m not alone because we’ve all recently suffered loss in one way or another — a parent, friend, or pet, for example. When someone asks me how I’m doing, I respond that I’m doing ok, doing my best to hang in there. We all are.

Add to that the fact that this time of the year, the days get dark earlier and the air is cold to frigid. I often feel extra ugh and blah. Cooking something new and fun seems like a monumental challenge. That’s why I turn to low-lift treats that are versatile. They’re easy to make and I can tweak and spin them in various directions to stir my culinary curiosity and delight my friends and family.

Rescued by a Nutty Nibble

I invited a small group over for Indian food this week and not wanting to serve too rich of foods at the front end, I wanted a wine-friendly nibble with big flavors. I ended up roasting several batches of candied nuts.

I was playing with a remarkable candied pecan recipe published in the

David Lebovitz Newsletter

. I’ve known David for many years and he’s a great writer, smart cook and thoughtful recipe developer. (He also enjoys Vietnamese food and generously endorsed my last book.) His spiced pecan technique simply called for coating raw pecans with confectioner’s sugar, a bit of water, ground chile and salt, then baking the nuts.

I’ve candied walnuts by deep frying, and I’ve also done small batches in a skillet. But David’s use of confectioner’s (powdered) sugar was brilliant — it coats efficiently and contains a bit of cornstarch to control moisture. Granulated sugar wouldn’t behave that way. He hydrates with water to facilitate coating. I was curious to experience and experiment with David’s original Spiced Candied Pecans recipe (below is a link, for your convenience!).

Spiced Candied Pecans

Hanging out in my freezer were a five-pound bag of Elliot pecans from Georgia and a two-pound bag of walnuts from Costco. I was well prepared to play around.

Chili Crisp Candied Nuts Experiment

My question was this: What would happen if I added chile crisp — the Chinese cult condiment that’s fatty, salty, spicy, umami and a touch sweet? How would that impact coating the nuts and how would the flavor come through?

My first time out, I used pecans and mixed all the ingredients at once in a bowl. The flavor was spicy sweet savory and sometimes numbing due to the Sichuan peppercorns. However, the flavors were unevenly distributed because things got a bit clumpy.

On trial two, I used walnuts and added the ingredients in stages. Why slow down the mixing? Because once the sugar got into the bowl, you can’t easily verify how well the chile crisp got around. Also, there was no clumping.

Chili crisp coating, wetting with water, coating with powdered sugar, ready for baking.

When spooning out the chile crisp, I tried to get as much of the solids as I could but in the end, the bits didn’t all adhere to the nuts during roasting. Because of that, when I stirred the nuts in the oven, I tried to catch as much of the solids as possible so they’d cling to the nutty bits.

How much heat you add to the nuts depends on your palate. I have a moderate to moderately-low tolerance for chile heat and so did our friends who came for dinner. We paired the nuts with an easygoing sparkling wine — Birichino Pétulant Naturel Carignan rosé — the chile crisp candied nuts were a hit! (The nuts recipe is at the end of this post because I don’t want you to miss the next part, another recipe!)

Confectioner’s Sugar — Hero Ingredient

Playing around with David’s candied nuts recipe highlighted a use of confectioner’s sugar that I’d not considered. Up until the nuts, I’d employed it for icing, cream cheese frosting, coating cookies, and in Chinese-style moon cake filling, but those were for relatively complicated projects. The nuts were a simple, brilliant use for the powdery sugar. And, if I’m going to get you to buy confectioner’s ingredient, shouldn’t I come up with another use to help justify your sugar purchase?

For the past several months, I’ve been playing with baking palmiers using Vietnamese spices. My mom adores bánh palmiers made from puff pastry. Two boxes of Trader Joe’s puff pastry lingered in my freezer from 2021. It’s a seasonal item that I annually stock up on.

Canvasing my cookbook collection, I came across two worthy palmier recipes from pastry pros Bruce Healy’s The French Cookie Book and Michael Richard’s Happy in the Kitchen. They were similar but slightly different. Richard dusted his dough slices with confectioner’s sugar for an even, lightly sweet coating. Healy flipped his cookies and baked them at two temperatures.

I went four or five rounds with the palmiers, trying different spices, learning to finesse the baking, and restocking my TJ puff supply in the process. Out of the experiments came a petit palmier recipe and I filmed a how-to video for you to make the cookies too! Because the assets are a bit complex, the Viet-Spiced Petit Palmier recipe and video are at Viet World Kitchen for you to use.

Tinkering with the palmiers and the chile crisp candied nuts was a delicious distraction. The a-ha moments came quickly with little investment in time or money. The payoff were smallish treats with big flavors, which also meant that I could satisfy my urge to splurge with a nibble here and there. They delivered joy to counter the moments of December doldrums.

Play with these recipes. Share them with others. They keep well. They are easy cooking projects to make and offer a wealth of insights.

Scroll on down for the chili crisp candied nuts recipes!

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Chile crisp nuts vs Spicy Sweet Lemongrass Nuts

Chili Crisp Candied Nuts / Spicy Sweet Lemongrass Nuts

Use pecans for their sweet buttery flavor. Opt for walnuts if you prefer richness with a tannic edge. I wrote up the recipe for a small amount because I’m encouraging you to experiment with different kinds of nuts and chili crisp.

Update 11/21/23: I tweaked this recipe to be spicier-sweet and by even better tasting by using a lemograss-chile oil known as Vegan Sate Sauce in Ever-Green Vietnamese. This 2023 iteration is wickedly good. The strike-through text reflects my changes. The PDF has been updated and cleaned up. I’ve given the recipe two names because it depend on you season the nuts. The sate nuts (on the right) are darker because of the nori in the Viet chile oil.

Chili Crisp Candied Nuts

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Makes generous 1 cup  

• 1 brimming cup raw pecans or walnuts

• 1 1/2 2 teaspoons chili crisp or Vegan Sate Sauce from Ever-Green Vietnamese

• 1/8 teaspoon fine sea salt, or 1/4 teaspoon Diamond Crystal kosher salt

• 1 teaspoon water, plus more as needed

• 2 to 3 tablespoons confectioner’s (powdered) sugar

Preheat the oven to 350F with a rack in the middle position. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper or a silicone baking mat.

In a medium bowl, stir together the pecans with the chili crisp (or Vegan Sate Sauce) to coat the nuts well. Sprinkle in the salt and give the mixture a few stirs to distribute. Add the water and stir to coat well. Sprinkle on the confectioner’s sugar and stir to combine. If there are lots of patches of white in the nut crevices, work in ¼ to ½ teaspoon water to dissolve. Taste a bit of the coating mixture to verify that you like the flavor. If you need to balance the sweet, spicy, savory flavor, add salt by the pinch or confectioner’s sugar by the 1/2 teaspoon.

Dump the nuts onto the prepared baking sheet, spreading them out. Bake for 10 to 14 minutes, stirring twice, until the nuts are golden brown and encrusted with sugary bits. Let cool completely on the baking sheet before serving or storing in an airtight container (a jar is excellent) for a good week.