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Photo by Hank Shaw
When my friend Charlie asked if I wanted some pine nuts, I said sure, but I was confused. We are a long way from the high desert home of the piñon pine. Uh, where on earth did you get them? “From around my house,” he said. “They’re all over. I’ll bring you a gunnysack full of ‘em.” And so he did.
Charlie wasn’t entirely sure what sort of pine he’d been collecting nuts from for years, but he thought — correctly — that they were digger pines. Pinus sabiniana, a tree now called the gray or bull pine because, apparently, the term “digger” wasn’t real complimentary to the local Indians who once used these trees for pitch and for food.
Gray pines are unmistakable: Huge, spare, almost wispy, sporting gigantic cones that can knock you out or even kill you if you are so unfortunate as to be underneath one when it falls. This cone is nearly the size of a toddler’s head. Those are the nuts behind the cone. Aren’t they cute?
Photo by Holly A. Heyser
Gray pines only live in California, and only inland. They ring the Central Valley and extend a little into Oregon. But you won’t find them on the Coast, or in any other state. They are NorCal’s answer to the great piñon pines of the desert. Oh, and for all of you on the East Coast? Sorry man, but so far as I know there are no pines east the Mississippi that have large enough nuts to be worth collecting. If I am wrong, let me know.
Someday I will venture to the Great Basin to collect America’s finest pine nuts, those of the piñon pine (Pinus edulis) and the single-leaf piñon (Pinus monophylla). Both are trees of the desert, and are common from Nevada to Utah and the Southwest states of Arizona and New Mexico. Keep in mind that more than 80 percent of the pine nuts eaten in American are actually from China and are from for Korean pine.
If you are lucky enough to get your hands on real American piñon or Italian pine nuts (Pinus pinea), treasure them: They are high in fat and will not give you that nasty, metallic ”pine mouth” that some Asian pine nuts will. Pine mouth can last for days.
Photo by Holly A. Heyser
Back to my NorCal pine nuts. You may notice that they don’t look like typical pine nuts. Gray pine nuts are long and slender, although they can weigh almost as much as a store-bought nut. So, you ask yourself, why isn’t someone commercially harvesting the nuts from Pinus sabiniana?
Let me tell you why. To get this little half-pint jar of nuts, it required at least 3 hours of tedious work. It starts with the cones. You collect the cones in September or October and keep them in a place that is airy, but dry; my garage was an ideal spot. You collect the cones when they are still tightly closed — otherwise the squirrels will eat all the nuts before you can get to them. Over time, they slowly open, revealing the nut within.
Photo by Hank Shaw
Your first labor is to get all the nuts out of the cones. Do this by banging them around in the gunnysack (old coffee sacks are ideal) until the nuts all fall out. Or you can whack them on your garage floor. Or you can pick them out by hand. Watch out for the resinous pitch, though, won’t come off your hands unless you douse them in oil or some other solvent.
Many of the nuts will have a little wingy thing attached. This connects the nut to the cone. Toss it. You’ll notice that the nuts range from big to small, and from shiny brown to matte charcoal-black. My experience is that the darker the nut is on the outside, the better the nut is inside. Toss nuts with holes in them; some bug has gotten to it before you.
These are the nuts you are looking for:
Photo by Hank Shaw
That does not mean you should toss the brown nuts, however, but once you crack them you will find you’ll get a larger percentage of aborted nuts with the lighter-colored nuts. What’s an aborted nut? Apparently, when a gray pine is stressed by heat — this happens mostly at lower elevations — the tree will abort many of its nuts. You can’t tell which are good and which are back until you crack them, but this is what the aborted nut looks like:
Photo by Hank Shaw
To crack a pine nut, you will need a hammer. This is a main reason why gray pine nuts are not sold commercially. The shell is thick, and very, very hard. You can crack the “good” piñon pine nuts of the desert between your teeth, and some innovative souls in Nevada have designed shellers for them. These will not work with the gray pine nut, which has a shell only marginally softer than the dreaded black walnut.
I cracked my pine nuts on my garage floor. I found the best way to do it without pulverizing the nut was a tap-TAP! with the hammer. All you want to do is crack the shell.
Photo by Hank Shaw
Once cracked, you now need to carefully extract the nuts from all those shells. It’s not as hard as fishing out the goodies from black walnuts, but pine nuts are soft and break easily. The paper skins come right off once the nuts are out of the shell.
I imagine this whole process would not be so hard if I had a comfortable place to do it all. But sitting on the concrete floor with a hammer, bent over, for several hours, was not my idea of fun.
What kept me going was Charlie’s insistence that these pine nuts were better tasting than store-bought. Each little nut I plunked into the jar became a gold nugget, and recipes swam through my head as I worked: Pesto? A cream sauce for pasta? Muffins? A crust for meat? Cookies?
Yes, cookies. I love pine nut cookies. But I wanted them to be special cookies. I’d only get one chance to make these because I would run out of pine nuts if I failed the first time. So I searched around and read a dozen or so pine nut cookie recipes until I decided on a pine nut cookie with rosemary. I like the idea of two piney ingredients playing with each other. Just to make things a little weirder, I added some acorn flour to the cookie as well. Yeah, I know. Hippie cookies. Sue me.
Photo by Elise Bauer
They were actually really good. Definitely a nutty, whole-grain thing going on (even though acorns aren’t a grain), and you can definitely taste the rosemary. And the pine nuts? Well, they were fine.
But only fine. Italian pine nuts are better, as are the piñon pine nuts from the desert. My pine nuts were noticeably better than the Asian ones, and I will still collect them — but given that 7 ounces of unshelled nuts gave me only 1 ounce of shelled nuts, I think it’s worth the drive over the Sierras to get the better nuts in Nevada.
Still, I am glad I did this experiment. Our local pine nuts are delicious — and free for the taking — but they are a lot of work and do not yield as well as the pine nuts of the high desert. So you have to balance the cost of gas for a better nut versus the cost in effort to extract these smaller nuts. I’d say it’s pretty close, but I’ll fill up the truck and head over the mountains next time.
MORE ON PINE NUTS
- My Pine Nut and Rosemary Cookie recipe
- Another take on pine nuts and rosemary, a shortbread from Heidi of 101 Cookbooks
- An interesting paper on the potential for commercial harvest of pine nuts in America
- Snow Peas with Pine Nuts and Mint, from Simply Recipes
When I lived in Idyllwild California we had Coulter Pines which were nicknamed Widow Makers. I remember hearing the cones falling from the trees and running for safety!
Until I read this piece I honestly never thought about where Pine Nuts came from. Now I understand why they cost so much!
I think you can find pinon pines in the high desert in So Cal around the Antelope Valley. Specifically the Tehachapi area. I took a bunch of archaeology classes several years ago out there and my professor talked a lot about the pinon nuts that the Native Americans harvested around the AV. Might be worth a trip next time you are near Los Angeles.
We live on the east coast, and have no viable pine nuts in our area, but my husband came home from a road trip out west with a few nut-laden cones — don’t know the species, and the nuts were just barely big enough to prevent the enterprise of extracting them from being laughable.
I nevertheless concluded that the time, resin-coated hands, and aborted nut ratio, made it just not worth it. And I love pine nuts — which makes me think I’d *really* love those cookies.
We got something similar in Brazil.
The araucaria is a Brazilian native tree and is commonly
called the Brazilian Pine Tree. It has always been at the base of the food
system of the inhabitants of the meridional area of the Country. The tree
can reach up to 40 meters of height, and live on average 200 to 300
years, even 500 years.
The pine nut is the Araucaria angustifolia seed, which is approximately
4 centimeters long, ivory colored, surrounded by a thick shell, and picked
in large pines, which can contain from 10 to 120 pine nuts.
In traditional cooking, pine nuts are used in many recipes; they are usually
cooked in water for a number of preparations, or baked directly on the
grill of cooking stoves at the houses of those who picked them. The two
most traditional recipes made with pine nuts are the pine nut paçoca
(cooked and ground pine nut, mixed with dry meat in a pounder), and
entrevero (vegetable and meat stew with pine nuts).
Thank you for satisfying my curiosity. I have heard of people collecting seeds from Digger (Grey) Pines and heard it was more work than it was worth. You have convinced me to spend my time in other ways. But….I have also hear of Sugar Pine cone seeds being collected. I live in the Sierras where Sugar Pines are very common. Might have to give that a try.
Melissa (Comment #2) is right about Pinon pines in the Antelope Valley. My family had a vacation cabin in the Tehachapi mountains, and as kids, my brothers and I spent many hours harvesting pine nuts. Last fall, while driving home from a camping trip in California’s Eastern Sierras, my husband and I stopped at a gas station on a Native American reservation, and there were small bags of locally-foraged, unshelled pine nuts for sale. I bought one and spent a good part of the drive shelling and eating them–the taste really took me back to childhood.
Nicole: I’ve read about the Coulter pines. I do know the nuts are large enough to harvest from them, but again, it’ll be like these gray pine nuts. Better than the Chinese nuts, but not as good as the desert nuts.
Melissa and Carol: Yep, I know you can find pinons in that area, but from where I live it is closer to drive to Nevada north of Reno.
Joao: Very cool! I’d vaguely heard about these nuts. Thanks for the info!
Great post Hank, makes one feel humbled. It is is easy to just go buy these tiny source of deliciousness. It is amazing how much labor it requires to process them.
The Brazilian pinhão is delicious. It never occurred to me but next time I am in Brazil I will try making pesto out of it. The nuts are so gigantic I think you would need just a few of them to prepare the dish.
Araucaria trees are incredibly beautiful.
Heguiberto
I loved this post. I don’ t know why the thought of foraging excites me so much. Sort of like a treasure hunt I guess. We have lots of pines here in Florida, I am now wondering if I shouldn’t collect some pine cones myself…..:)
Ouch ouch ouch. Hurt fingers. We collected pinenuts for dinner while at Wilbur Hot Springs – probably Digger Pines. And my wife’s family used to collect them in Nevada City. But i really respect squirrels a hell of a lot more, now.
I would try anything with a “cookie” label on it…hippie or not!
Hank,
I have access to Nob Cone pines in Napa. Would they be acceptable?
Steve
Great post Hank. Growing up in NE Nevada, havesting pinon pine nuts was an annual affair. Some years were better than others just like any other crop. We also used the gunny sack beat on the ground separation technique. Then pliers. I now live in AZ and up in the north there are huge swaths of pinon pine. Or I should say that there USED to be. Boring pine beetles have decimated the stands of pinon pine. Same thing up into northern NM. I have often wondered if a similar catastrophic dying out of pinon pines led to the sudden disappearance of the Anasazi, or “Ancient Ones.” They inhabited the area generally located around the Four Corners area. Pine nuts would have been a primary source of nourishment. Especially winter stores. If the pinon pines died en masse, so too would have other food sources. Squirrels for example, which indigenous people hunted extensively using deadfall traps and probably snares. I have also personally witnessed mule deer pawing at pinon pine cones and munching on the nuts, so that food source would have been diminished as well. Just a theory, but a good mystery begs a causation hypothesis. Suddenly I’m thinking of a version of Navajo fry bread with pine nut flour. Hmm.
Try coating your hands with vaseline before handling pine cones. The pitch comes off much easier.
For those of us in the North/East/Northeast, there are several options for edible pine nuts.
In slightly warmer climes (Zones 7-9) the Italian Stone Pine can be grown. The hardier Korean Stone Pine and Siberian Stone Pine can be grown farther north.
Burnt Ridge Nursery and One Green World are both excellent places to find these trees. Happy munching!
The Chumash used to take the “path of the pinon gatherers” to Mt. Pinos which is located in the Los Padres National Forest in Ventura/Kern County. Pinon pine abounds there. I have been taking the path myself over the past few years. A truly magical place and a truly tasty nut!
Good chukar and quail hunting nearby as well.
Sunchowder: Unless you can find where someone planted Italian stone pines, you are out of luck. No native pines with large enough nuts in the East.
Mamajack: Heh. I hear ya. I am astonished at how easily the squirrels get into the cones.
Steve: No way to know until you try!
Stephen: Fry bread with pine nut flour? Oh man, a heart attack on a plate, but oh-so good!
Andy G: Ew.
Matt: Good point. Lots of people have planted those in the East….
Daniel: Sounds like I need to get on that trail with a sack and a shotgun.
[...] Island (or Isla Tortuga, or if you must, North America). Out here in Cali, we get acorns and pine nuts. What about [...]
Hank
Great post. You had info I was looking. My family started gathering pine nuts
last year. We use them for traditional necklaces. Thank you
[...] or the pine nuts of the Fertile Crescent. According to this guy, working with wild pine nuts is a labor of love. Walnuts on the other hand, simply require shelling, like a good domesticated orchard crop [...]
Thanks so much for the very valuable information. I love to forage for all kinds of foods. This was very informational, and now I understand why pine nuts are so expensive in the store. I will be looking for some of the trees mentioned on this page, hopefully some of them have been planted here. In any case this has been a great read! Thanks for sharing it!