Baking

Raw Cashews

Cashews carry real weight in global cooking well beyond the snack bowl — ground into a paste that thickens and enriches an Indian korma, stirred whole into a Thai stir-fry for crunch, or blended smooth as the base of a dairy-free sauce, three genuinely different roles for what looks like the same nut.

Cashew grading uses a size code most shoppers never see spelled out — W180, W240, W320, and similar numbers refer to how many whole cashews make up a pound, with a lower number meaning larger, generally pricier nuts — while broken pieces, sold more cheaply, work just as well in anything that gets chopped or blended anyway.

The tree the cashew grows on also produces the cashew apple, a soft, tropical fruit largely unfamiliar outside cashew-growing regions since it bruises too easily to ship well — the nut itself develops in a single hard shell that hangs beneath that fruit, an unusual growth structure among common tree nuts.

For everyday cooking, whole cashews suit a stir-fry or a snack mix where their shape matters, while pieces are the better buy for a recipe that blends or grinds them anyway — a straightforward way to save money without giving up anything in the finished dish.

Cashew butter, ground from roasted or raw cashews into a smooth spread, has grown into a mainstream alternative to peanut butter for anyone avoiding peanuts specifically, since a tree-nut allergy and a peanut (legume) allergy are medically distinct conditions even though both nuts get grouped together at a casual glance.

Roasted, salted cashews sold as a snack are a genuinely different product from the raw or lightly steamed cashews called for in most savory cooking and blended sauces, since roasting and added salt change both the flavor and how the nut behaves when blended into something like a cream sauce.

The cashew tree is native to Brazil, and the nut's name traces back to the Portuguese word for the cashew apple's original Tupi-Guarani name, a history that predates the nut's much later rise as a staple of Indian and Southeast Asian cooking after Portuguese traders introduced it to those regions.

Vietnam and India today produce and process a substantial share of the world's cashew supply despite the tree's South American origin, an agricultural shift driven largely by Portuguese trade routes centuries ago that moved cashew cultivation into new tropical regions where it eventually took firmer root than in its native range.

A handful of cashews tossed whole into a stir-fry near the end of cooking, rather than at the start, keeps them from softening in the sauce's moisture, preserving the crunch that a longer simmer would otherwise take away — a small timing detail that separates a dish with genuinely crisp cashews from one where they've gone soft and lost their point.