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Ask any chef about roasting a piece of meat and they'll talk about heat control. Ask a professional nut roaster and they'll talk about the same thing — and then they'll tell you there are two very different ways to get heat into a cashew. One is to fry it in oil. The other is to roast it in air.
At Nuts Pick, every nut we sell is air-roasted. No oil goes into the drum, no oil comes out on the pack. Here's what air roasting actually is, how it differs from the oil-roasted nuts most supermarkets stock, and why it matters for taste, texture and calorie count.
Air roasting is exactly what it sounds like. Raw nuts go into a rotating drum, the drum is heated, and hot air is pushed through it. The nuts tumble, the heat circulates evenly around each one, and the natural oils inside the nut begin to warm. That's when the magic happens: sugars caramelise, amino acids undergo the Maillard reaction, and flavour compounds develop that weren't there in the raw nut.
The process is slow and precise. Small batches, carefully watched, taken out at the exact moment flavour peaks. Think of it as the difference between roasting a chicken in an oven and deep-frying it. Both cook the bird. Only one lets you taste the bird.
Most commercial "roasted" nuts aren't actually roasted in the traditional sense. They're fried. The nuts are dropped into a vat of hot vegetable oil — usually sunflower, rapeseed or palm — and pulled out when they turn a uniform golden colour. It's fast, cheap, and scales easily. But it adds oil that wasn't there before, and that oil carries its own flavour into the nut.
| Factor | Air roasted | Oil (fried) roasted |
|---|---|---|
| Cooking medium | Circulating hot air | Vegetable oil bath |
| Added oil / calories | None | 3–6g fat per 100g added |
| Typical fat content (cashews) | ~44g / 100g | ~50g / 100g |
| Flavour | Clean, nut-forward | Slight oil aftertaste |
| Texture | Dry, crisp snap | Slicker, sometimes slightly greasy |
| Shelf life (sealed) | Longer — no added oils to oxidise | Shorter — added oils oxidise faster |
| Batch size | Small, controlled | Large, continuous |
| Cost to produce | Higher | Lower |
Look at a pack of supermarket "roasted and salted" cashews and you'll usually see one of those oils listed as an ingredient. Our pack lists only the nut and sea salt. That's the quiet but important difference.
Because no external fat enters the nut, the only oils developing during the roast are the ones the nut was grown with. Those oils are specific to each variety — buttery in macadamia, grassy in pistachio, sweet and creamy in cashew. Air roasting lets each of those signatures come through cleanly.
Chefs tend to prefer air-roasted nuts for the same reason they prefer single-origin olive oil: you can actually taste what you're eating. It's why our Salted Cashews won a Great Taste 2025 1-star award. The judges said the cashew flavour was "clean and unmasked" — exactly what the method is designed to deliver.
Nuts are already a healthy food: protein, fibre, unsaturated fats, vitamin E, magnesium. But how you roast them affects how much of those benefits reach your plate.
We invested in air-roasting drums because we wanted two things most UK nut brands can't offer at the same time: clean flavour and made-to-order freshness. Air roasting gives us the first. Roasting within 48 hours of your order gives us the second.
When you order a jar, the process looks like this:
That's the process behind every pack, jar and gift hamper we make.
Roughly yes, but not always. "Dry roasted" is a broad term used on supermarket labels that generally means "not cooked in added oil." In practice, some dry-roasted products are baked on a conveyor belt or roasted in a static oven, which gives uneven colour and patchy flavour. True air roasting uses controlled hot-air circulation inside a rotating drum, giving every nut the same exposure. It's dry roasting done properly.
The easiest way to understand the difference is to taste it. Pick up a jar of our Great Taste award-winning Salted Cashews, sit one alongside a supermarket roasted-and-salted cashew, and try them blind. Most people guess right on the first bite.
Air-roasted nuts are cooked with circulating hot air and no added oil. Oil-roasted nuts are fried in vegetable oil, usually sunflower or palm. Air roasting adds no calories or fat beyond what's naturally in the nut, and produces a cleaner flavour and drier texture.
They contain no added cooking oil, so they're lower in total fat and calories than oil-roasted nuts of the same variety. The core nutritional profile — protein, fibre, vitamin E, healthy unsaturated fats — stays intact, and retention of heat-sensitive vitamins can be slightly higher.
Most tasters find them more "nut-forward" because there's no background flavour of cooking oil. Single-origin and varietal character comes through more clearly. It's the same principle as preferring single-origin coffee to a generic blend.
Air roasting is slower, needs smaller batches, and costs more per kilogram to produce than oil frying. It's harder to industrialise and harder to standardise across varieties. For brands competing on price, it rarely adds up. For brands competing on flavour, it's worth every extra minute.
You can approximate it by dry-roasting in a heavy pan or oven tray at around 160°C for 10–15 minutes, shaking every few minutes so they colour evenly. You'll get most of the flavour benefit, though without the drum-roasted uniformity. Store whatever you don't eat in an airtight jar.
