They should be safe to eat after washing and then roasting as long as they aren't visibly damaged and assuming they are real chestnuts and not horsechestnuts. Horsechestnuts are not true chestnuts, they are in the buckeye family and are toxic.

Rodney

Thanks for the heads up on the horse chestnut. I googled and I'm pretty confident. My husks look just like the porcupiny husks on this page, not like the horse chestnut husk on the linked page.

Here is a link that might be useful: Horse vs. edible chestnut

Yes, they should be ok so long as the little critters haven't been eating into them. My chinese chestnuts are just on the brink of dropping so I have to go out every day and check for them on the ground to keep the little suckers from eating them up before I can get to them.

But make absolute sure that what you have is indeed an edible chinese chestnut, and not a poisonous other chestnut.

So I thought the reason the chestnuts were dropping was because the squirrels were somehow opening up the husks and then (accidently?) dropping them from the tree. Now I know better. I didn't realize that the mature chestnuts break out of their husks on their own.

My only other nut gathering experience was with a black walnut which fall in their husks so I had assumed that chestnuts would be the same. Granted, I did have a few spiky husks on the ground too, but I figured out what was really happening when I saw a few husks breaking open while still attached to the tree.

I've gathered up a hundred or so (and there are a lot left on the trees), now I just need to find something to do with them!

Chestnuts are delicious! Roast them and eat them as a snack, or roast, shell, and add to you Thanksgiving stuffing.

Went to the Luther Burbank Experimental Gardens in Sebastopol CA this last week. His hybrid cross chestnuts were monstrous. What I see different is that they are very spiny and don't fall to the ground compared to the inedible ones. My friend is enamored with chestnut cheesecake (not on my big list of yummy, but friend after all) and I brought back a pile of chestnut puree for just such a treat for her. To me the chestnut is likened to avocado - it is there, it has some color, it has exotic nuances to it relative to the west coast, but really, it is just there as a filler. Now if we talk about pecans or hazelnuts with identifiable intense flavors, -whole other story.
Nancy
Nancy

It's so cool how different people's taste buds react differently!

To me, chestnut flavor is about as strong as pecan, and hazelnut is a little stronger. And I only recently learned that, to some people, broccoli is bitter.

And I had to lol at the idea of avocados being exotic. I live on the west coast; here they are about as normal as apples :).

Chestnuts are encased in a spiny, prickly, thorny, covering; buckeyes (horse chestnuts) are knobby, not prickly.

They are indeed dropping now. I've about 30 trees of the Dunstan strain planted on my place.

My advice is to gather them and spread them out in the dry and let them cure for a while. This gives time to dry out a little and become sweeter (the drier they get the sweeter they get), and, if there's any weevils in them they will bore out of the nut during this curing time.

Nearly every wild critter I know of eats our chestnuts, even our dogs eat them like candy.

Here is a link that might be useful: THE DUNSTAN CHESTNUT

To me, chestnuts have no resemblance to pecan, walnuts etc, in taste. Raw chestnut is soft and tastes very starchy. When roasted, it gets sweeter and without that starchy taste.