25 Types of Nuts, From Kitchen Staples to Hidden Gems

You’ve probably heard the advice countless times: eat more nuts. They’re one of the cornerstones of the Mediterranean diet and consistently rank among the healthiest foods you can add to your plate. Rich in healthy fats, protein, fiber, vitamins, and minerals, nuts have been linked to better heart health, improved cholesterol levels, and a lower risk of chronic disease.

But what exactly is a nut? The answer is surprisingly complicated. Botanically speaking, many of the foods we casually call nuts (including almonds, walnuts, pistachios, pecans, and cashews) aren’t true nuts at all. They’re actually seeds or the kernels of drupe-like fruits. Peanuts are legumes, coconuts are drupes, and tiger nuts are underground tubers. Yet in the kitchen and even in your nutritionist’s office, they’re all treated as nuts because they share similar flavors, textures, culinary uses, and nutritional profiles.

Like most good things, however, moderation matters. Nuts are incredibly nutrient-dense, but they’re also calorie-dense, with many varieties packing around 160–220 calories per ounce (28 g). A small handful each day can be a great addition to a healthy diet, but it’s surprisingly easy to overdo it if you’re mindlessly snacking straight from the bag.

In this guide, we use the culinary definition rather than the botanical one. You’ll discover 23 types of nuts from around the world, from everyday favorites like almonds, walnuts, and hazelnuts to lesser-known treasures such as baru, mongongo, and butternuts. Along the way, you’ll learn what makes each one unique, how to cook with it, and the nutritional benefits that have made nuts a staple of healthy diets for thousands of years.

1. Almonds

Almonds are one of the most versatile nuts in the kitchen, prized for their mild, slightly sweet flavor and satisfying crunch. They work equally well raw, roasted, blanched, or ground into flour and paste, making them a staple in everything from Turkish sweets to Italian patisserie and everyday snacking. Almond butter and almond milk have cemented their place in modern pantries too. Rich in vitamin E and healthy monounsaturated fats, they also offer a solid hit of protein and magnesium, making them as practical nutritionally as they are culinarily.

2. Macadamia Nuts

Macadamia nuts are the undisputed luxury item of the nut world: smooth, buttery, and rich in a way that feels almost decadent. Native to Australia but now strongly associated with Hawaiian cuisine, they’re used in cookies, confections, and tropical-inspired dishes, and their high fat content makes them excellent for adding richness to both sweet and savory recipes.

That fat profile is worth noting: macadamias are exceptionally high in monounsaturated fats, particularly palmitoleic acid, which is associated with cardiovascular health.

3. Brazil Nuts

Brazil nuts are large, dense, and creamy with a mild, slightly woody flavor that pairs well with chocolate and works beautifully in baked goods and nut mixes. They grow wild in the Amazon rainforest, harvested from towering trees that resist cultivation, which keeps them relatively scarce and gives them a compelling origin story.

Just one or two a day is enough to meet your entire daily selenium requirement, a mineral important for thyroid function and antioxidant defense, making Brazil nuts one of the most potent single-food sources of any nutrient.

4. Walnuts

With their distinctively bold, slightly bitter flavor and a rich, almost creamy texture beneath that papery skin, walnuts bring real depth to both sweet and savory dishes. They’re excellent toasted and tossed into salads, folded into pumpkin bread, cakes, or blended into dips. Among nuts, walnuts stand out for their exceptionally high content of ALA omega-3 fatty acids, which support heart and brain health. For a bit of fun trivia, check out our story on the top walnut-producing countries in the world.

5. Hazelnuts

Hazelnuts are one of the few true botanical nuts. They have a warm, toasty sweetness that becomes even more pronounced when roasted, and that depth of flavor is exactly why they’ve become synonymous with chocolate, most famously in gianduja and spreads like Nutella (you can try this easy vegan “Nutella” spread recipe, if you’re curious).

Beyond confectionery, they work well in savory cooking too: ground into sauces, used in crusts, or paired with roasted beets and goat cheese in salads. Hazelnuts are a good source of folate and vitamin E, and their healthy fat content helps make them both filling and nutritionally worthwhile.

6. Pine Nuts

Pine nuts are the small, elongated seeds of certain pine trees, and their delicate, buttery flavor and tender texture make them a prized ingredient in Mediterranean and Middle Eastern cuisines. They’re perhaps best known as the essential fat in classic basil pesto, but they also turn up toasted over pasta, stirred into rice dishes, and used in both sweet pastries and savory stuffings. Nutritionally, pine nuts are rich in manganese and provide a useful dose of zinc.

7. Chestnuts

Chestnuts are the odd one out in the nut world, starchy rather than oily, with a dense, slightly sweet flesh that behaves more like a root vegetable than a traditional nut. They’re roasted, boiled, puréed into creamy desserts or savory stuffings, and sometimes ground into a gluten-free flour widely used in Italian and French regional cooking. Unlike most nuts, they’re low in fat and relatively high in complex carbohydrates and vitamin C, which is unusual for a nut and makes them a genuinely distinctive addition to the pantry.

8. Coconut

Coconut defies easy categorization. Botanically considered a drupe, culinarily treated as a nut, and texturally unlike anything else. The white flesh can be eaten fresh, dried and shredded or pressed into milk. It lends a delicious tropical flavor to cakes, and other desserts, but it’s also a staple in savory cooking, especially with seafood, giving it one of the broadest culinary ranges of any ingredient in this list.

It’s central to cuisines across South and Southeast Asia, the Caribbean, and West Africa. Coconut is high in saturated fat, primarily medium-chain triglycerides (MCTs), which are metabolized differently than most fats, a characteristic that has driven significant interest in coconut oil in recent years.

9. Peanuts

Technically a legume, peanuts have long earned their place in the nut world through sheer culinary ubiquity. They work great roasted and salted, used as peanut butter on sandwiches, in cakes and cookies, or pressed into oil. They also are a key ingredient in many different sauces, stews, salads, and American candy bars. Their versability is incredible!

Peanuts have a robust, earthy flavor that deepens with roasting and holds up well alongside bold spices and sweetness alike. Peanuts are an impressive source of plant-based protein and niacin, and they contain resveratrol, the same antioxidant compound found in red wine.

10. Black Walnuts

Black walnuts are the wilder, more intense cousin of the common English walnut, native to North America and boasting a bold, earthy flavor with a pungent, almost tannic edge that sets them apart immediately.

They’re not for the faint-hearted, but that intensity makes them a memorable addition to baked goods, ice cream, and savory sauces where you want a nut that actually makes its presence known. Their notoriously hard shells make cracking them a labor of love. Nutritionally, they deliver omega-3 fatty acids and are particularly rich in antioxidants compared to their milder relatives.

11. Pecans

Pecans are a distinctly American nut, native to the South and central regions of the continent, and their rich, buttery sweetness makes them one of the most indulgent options in the nut world. They shine in baked goods (pecan pie being the obvious classic) but are equally good candied, used in pies, or simply toasted and added to salads and grain bowls.

They’re a strong source of antioxidants, particularly tocopherols, and provide healthy fats that contribute to good cholesterol balance.

12. Hickory Nuts

Hickory nuts are an underappreciated North American native, closely related to pecans and sharing some of that buttery richness, though with a more complex, slightly smoky undertone. Harvesting them is labor-intensive because of their thick shells and a relatively modest yield, which explains why they’ve never achieved commercial mainstream status despite their excellent flavor. They can be used much like pecans in baked goods and nut mixes, and they shine when smoked or incorporated into savory dishes where their depth really comes through. Like most tree nuts, they’re a solid source of healthy fats and manganese.

13. Cashews

Cashews occupy a unique spot among nuts thanks to their naturally creamy texture and gently sweet, buttery flavor. When soaked and blended, they form the base of countless dairy-free sauces, cheeses, and desserts, a quality that has made them a cornerstone of plant-based cooking. They’re equally at home stir-fried whole in Asian dishes, mixed into savory sides or simply roasted and salted as a snack. Nutritionally, cashews provide a good source of copper and zinc, both important for immune function, along with heart-healthy monounsaturated fats.

14. Beechnuts

Beechnuts are small, triangular seeds from beech trees, once a significant food source across Europe and North America before other nuts took over. Their flavor is mild and slightly sweet when fresh, somewhere between a hazelnut and a sunflower seed, but they turn bitter if eaten raw in large quantities due to tannins, so light roasting is usually recommended. They can be ground into flour, pressed for oil, or eaten roasted as a snack. Beechnuts are a reasonable source of healthy unsaturated fats and provide useful amounts of thiamine and potassium.

16. Candlenut

The candlenut is a Southeast Asian staple rarely encountered in Western kitchens, used primarily as a thickening and flavoring agent in Indonesian, Malaysian, and Hawaiian cuisine. Raw candlenuts are actually mildly toxic and should always be cooked before eating, Roasting or simmering in curries and spice pastes like rendang and laksa is the standard approach. Their flavor is subtle and creamy rather than pronounced, functioning more like a background richness than a starring ingredient. Candlenuts are high in oil content, particularly unsaturated fatty acids, and have traditionally been used in cooking as much for texture as for taste.

17. Pistachios

Pistachios are hard to mistake due to their vivid green color, split shells, and subtly sweet, slightly earthy flavor set them apart from other nuts. They’re a natural fit for both sweet and savory applications: ground into Middle Eastern baklava, cakes, or pressed into crusts for lamb and fish. Pistachios are notably rich in lutein and zeaxanthin, compounds associated with eye health, and deliver more protein per serving than most other nuts.

18. Acorns

Acorns were a dietary staple for Indigenous peoples across North America, Europe, and Asia long before modern agriculture took hold, and interest in them has been revived among foragers and alternative grain enthusiasts. Raw acorns are bitter from tannins and require leaching (soaking in water repeatedly) before they become palatable. Once processed, acorn flour has a mildly nutty, earthy flavor and makes excellent pancakes, bread, and porridge. It’s naturally gluten-free and provides a decent range of complex carbohydrates, healthy fats, and minerals including manganese and potassium.

19. Kola Nuts

Kola nuts are more commonly known as a cultural and pharmacological ingredient than a culinary one, but they’ve been chewed and brewed across West and Central Africa for centuries as a stimulant and ceremonial food. They contain caffeine and theobromine, which give them a bitter, astringent flavor that most people find challenging to eat directly. In cooking, kola nut extract has historically been used to flavor beverages — most famously as an early ingredient in cola drinks.

21. Lotus Seeds

Lotus seeds (sometimes called lotus nuts) come from the seed pods of the lotus flower and are a staple ingredient in East and Southeast Asian cooking. When dried, they have a firm, starchy texture and mild, slightly sweet flavor that works well in both savory soups and sweet desserts. They’re most commonly found in Chinese mooncakes, sweet soups, and congee, or canned in syrup.

Lotus seeds are a good source of magnesium, phosphorus, and B vitamins, and in traditional food culture they’re associated with calming and nourishing properties, a reputation that keeps them embedded in medicinal cooking traditions across the region.

22. Baru Nuts

Baru nuts come from the Brazilian Cerrado savanna and have been gaining attention as one of the more nutritionally impressive nuts to emerge from South America in recent years. Their flavor is rich and toasty, somewhere between a peanut and a cashew, with a satisfying crunch that makes them excellent for snacking, trail mixes, and nut butters. They’re impressively high in protein and fiber for a nut, and they also deliver a strong antioxidant profile.

23. Butternuts (White Walnuts)

Butternuts are the gentler, sweeter sibling of the black walnut, native to eastern North America. Their flavor is rich and mild, closer to a conventional walnut but with more sweetness and less bitterness and they’ve historically been used in the same ways: baked goods, sweets, and nut butters. Butternut oil was also traditionally important.

Like other walnuts, they provide omega-3 fatty acids and antioxidants, and their relative rarity today makes them a genuinely special find at farmers markets or specialty stores.

24. Mongongo Nuts

Mongongo nuts, also called manketti nuts have a rich and earthy flavor with a firm, slightly chewy texture, and they’re traditionally roasted in hot ash before eating. In contemporary use, mongongo oil has attracted interest in cosmetic and culinary markets for its distinctive fatty acid profile, particularly its unusually high content of eleostearic acid. The nuts are also a strong source of protein, zinc, and vitamin E, making them one of the more nutritionally dense wild foods on this list.

25. Tiger Nuts

Despite the name, tiger nuts are actually small tubers (the underground corms of a grass-like plant) but their nutty, slightly sweet flavor and crunchy-chewy texture place them firmly in nut territory for culinary purposes. They’ve been consumed since ancient Egypt and remain a staple in parts of West Africa and Spain, where they’re the base of horchata de chufa, a popular chilled drink.

Tiger nuts are an exceptional source of prebiotic fiber, particularly inulin, which feeds beneficial gut bacteria and supports digestive health.

Nut Calories and Nutrition Facts

heck out the table below for the calorie content and key nutrients of each nut.

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