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You’d think that if anything would bring out the Greed of Man in me, it would be truffles, a sexy, intoxicating food that can fetch $300 a pound or more. Yet I’ve given plenty of them away to my friends without a second thought.
No, what really makes me feel like Gollum from Lord of the Rings, the wild food I hold most precious, is my store of shelled black walnuts. Don’t even ask. You can’t have any. They are mine I tell you, all mine!
For those of you who don’t know what a black walnut is, it is a generic term for the wild walnuts native to North America. There is one main species east of the Rockies, two in California, and a couple of others in Arizona and Texas. Black walnuts are, more or less, related to hickory nuts and butternuts.
What’s the difference between black walnuts and the kind you get in the store? The vast majority of walnuts you buy in stores are English (also called Persian) walnuts, which are larger and easier to shell than black walnuts. In some places you can buy them in stores, and you can buy black walnuts online.
Size is not the main difference between black walnuts and domesticated ones. Flavor is. Black walnuts taste far stronger than regular ones: More concentrated, walnut-y, and even a touch more bitter.
To me they are the difference between cream and skim milk, grouse and chicken, a wild strawberry and one of those gigantic ones grown on the coast of California. I will take black walnuts over regular ones any time, and for any price.
Luckily that price is free: Black walnut trees grow all around us here in Northern California. My friend Josh tipped me off to a great spot, too, which has so many old trees it took my just 10 minutes to fill two 5-gallon buckets.
OK, maybe I lied. Black walnuts are not free — if you take time into consideration. Nothing I have ever done, not winemaking, gardening, big-game hunting, processing acorns or curing olives is as labor-intensive as harvesting, hulling and shelling black walnuts. As my fellow forager Connie Green says, “black walnuts are a fortress.” Here’s the method I figured out to storm the gates.
First you need to harvest the walnuts at the correct stage of ripeness.
For starters, walnuts will probably not be ripe where you live until October, so wait until then to begin. November should be fine, too, and you can pick up fallen nuts from the ground around the trees into December, but by then our Little Gray Friends the squirrels will have had at them.
So you’re standing at a tree. You see all these forms of walnuts in front of you. Which to pick?
Green ones will most likely still be on the trees. Yes, you can collect them, but they have a surprise in store for you. The beige ones are rotting green ones — they are the hardest to work with, but the nut inside will still be fine. The black one at the bottom is how you will find most of your walnuts: It has its hull rotted and is pretty dry. Finally, if you’ve had lots of rain, you will find some nuts that will be pre-hulled, like the one under the half-shell.
Pick only pre-hulled walnuts that feel heavy for their size, as they will dry out in the shell once hulled.
For the most part, you will need to hull your walnuts. Lots of people say you should just drive over them with a car, but this stains your driveway. Stain? Why yes. Black walnut juice stains like nothing else. And it will not come off with any amount of scrubbing. If you fail to wear gloves when you hull black walnuts, you will have the Black Hand of Death for several days.
Sam Thayer, in his book Nature’s Garden, suggests stomping on the hulls in the field to get them off. This works, but incompletely in my experience with Northern California walnuts, Juglans hindsii. So I sit outside on my porch with three buckets — one with walnuts in it, one for the soon-to-be-hulled walnuts, and one for the hulls. I then don gloves and use a pocketknife to hull the nuts by hand.
You want a relatively dull knife that you can slice with and not be in danger of it piercing your work gloves. The work can get a little slippery, especially with the green walnuts — remember the surprise? That’s it. A half-hulled green walnut is slipperier than goose shit on a doorknob. This is why I prefer the walnuts with the fully rotted black hulls.
Beware when you are hulling walnuts outdoors. Our Little Gray Friends could be lurking anywhere, just waiting to steal your walnuts for themselves. I use a biological countermeasure to keep the squirrels away:
Once hulled, your work has just begun. Now you must shell your walnuts.
This is the point at which you can kick back a bit. Hulled walnuts store well in the shell, and in fact crack better once they’ve dried for a few weeks.
Once you start shelling, however, you need to banish from your head all notions that you will be able to crack black walnuts and get those pretty perfect halves you can get with regular walnuts. Won’t happen. Bits and pieces are the price of precious black walnut meats.
I crack mine with a hammer, on the concrete floor of my garage. Such force is necessary. I’ve never heard of a regular nutcracker fierce enough to break a black walnut, although some people in the Midwest, where the Eastern species lives, have created special black walnut shellers. Anyone ever use one? I’ll buy one if they work well…
The key to the hammer technique is to use a terrycloth towel to cover the nuts, so the pieces don’t fly all over the room. Use a towel you don’t care about, as it will get holes. Smack the nut with enough force to break it, but not enough to pulverize the nut; after a few, you’ll get the hang of it.
So now you have a bucket of cracked nuts. You’re still not done! Now you need to gently remove the meats from the impossibly complex interior of the walnut. I find the best piece of equipment to do this is a stout pair of wire cutters and a nutpick. I use the wire cutters to clip the shells in key spots so larger pieces of walnut fall out. Again, after a few dozen nuts you’ll begin to know where to clip. The nutpick’s use is obvious. This is tedious work, people. I do it while watching football.
Let me tell you before you begin a black walnut adventure that you need to be patient. It took me probably six hours of work to get 15 ounces of nutmeats — although that includes hulling all of my nuts, not just the portion I cracked and picked. But all this work is worth it.
Just the aroma of black walnuts is payment for the effort: They smell toasted without actually being so. And I’ve already mentioned the flavor, which is so strong many recipes say just half the amount of black walnuts will fully replace the flavor of regular ones. I’m not so sure about that, but you can use a bit less. If you want.
Which brings me, finally, to what I do with my black walnuts. In holiday season, I make a Christmas cookie from my childhood:
It is my version of a traditional walnut snowball cookie, also known as a Russian teacake or a Mexican wedding cake. My version has black walnuts, of course, but also orange flower water and a little orange liqueur. It’s an awesome cookie, a riff off one my mum has made for decades.
These cookies are stupid easy to make — no mixer necessary, just clean hands — and are so good you really need to make a double batch, because you will eat half of them before your friends or family come home. Trust me on this one.
We have so many black walnuts we fill the pickup truck bed with them several times in a season. Thus we’ve had to come up with some new ideas on how to get the hull off bushels of them, and then how to crack them efficiently. Here are a few tricks we’ve learned:
1: use a nut broom if you’re picking up a bunch. It looks like a whisk on a stick and works great.
2- let the hulls go black, then put in a barrel and spray with a power washer. Cleans the nuts, adds water. The nuts that float have air in them and are bad. Squirrels confirmed it, they wont take the floaters we set aside, the sinkers are fair game.
3-cracking. I have gotten cups and cups of whole nuts, some even both sides still connected. It is easier than you think and keeps from getting accidental shell bits in your nutmeats than the hammer method. Use an anvil pruner, the long handled ones fit easily around the nut and crack once or twice. Then use a set of micro flush cutters to snip the shell off from around the nut. It’s easy and efficient. I’ve perfected where to cut for the shape of our nuts, each variety is shaped a little differently.
Hope some of these tips helped!
I planted a Carpathian nut tree in the 80’s which turned out to be a black walnut tree. I harvested 800 nuts two years ago and 400 last fall. I use a large rubber mallet to whack the hull once and it peals right off the nut. I use a vise mounted on a 2×12 piece of wood and crack them while watching TV new etc. They pretty much bread into 4 quarters with 1 or 2 pieces loose and further cracking for the other 2 pieces. That’s about 4 hours for a 12oz size jar. I’m looking at various crackers and the Hunt’s or Grandpa Goodie’s Getter look like the best. I realized I had a cast iron 1 ton press a friend gave to me 35 years ago and never used. I want to try it before making a purchase. On that note another friend gave me a 2 can paint shaker I used to clean the hulled nuts and it worked great. I’m already looking forward to the Fall harvest. Last year my neighbor gave me his 3 walnut tree’s nuts and turned me on to a Forest Preserve where he walks his dog loaded with walnut trees. I had about 6 milk cases of nuts to shell over the next 3 months. Another neighbor cut his tree down to avoid the mess. Last fall the walnuts fell a month earlier in September. The year before October. I’m retired so it is a labor of love I got hooked on. I hull, clean , and hang to dry for at least 2 weeks in my garage before I begin cracking. There perfect. I irrigate my Carpathian nut and Pear tree from the river and wonder if that’s the reason for very large Black Walnuts. They taste the same as my neighbors Walnuts and are just as hard to crack but get more meat. FYI if while cleaning the nut floats it is bad. I found nuts the Squirrels ate by making 4 holes to get at each quarter of the nut. I enjoyed reading all the comments and hope I added to the cause. Thanks
I have black walnuts that were frozen. I want to make cookies today. The black walnuts seem to be very wet. Not sure if they should dry first before adding to the cookies.
I’m Sorry this turned out to be So Long of a post..
I just happened to read your blog while Ever Searching for a picture of the Inside of a black walnut. I moved into my grandparents home a few years back after they both past away. Being from a Large Italian family & the fact that my 4 siblings and I were the 1st to be born in America. The family is Very sentimental of the large beautiful home my grandparents built from hard work & pure determination on Both their parts. My grandma tragically lost her mother in her teens do to a cleaning explosion (star water & ammonia) mixture. She very quickly had to change her name to Sound more “generic” or American (sad to say the least) my grandfather lost his Dad at around the Same time(the actual account of it was in the local paper) Armed with my great-aunt I went to the local library & got myself a copy. Yeah the info Didn’t “add up”. BUT Back to the Black Walnuts. This is a Very Italian neighborhood Everyone lived off their gardens. Even the Yellow Double lines down the Center of the Main Road is … Yup Re,White & Green.. The Italian Flag. But black Walnut trees are Very poisonous to other plants as I’m reading Even their Roots emit poisonous toxins into the soil to Avoid competition from Any other plants. So it’s very easy to understand why am not finding a black walnut tree anywhere in sight also because this is a city. But a few months after we moved in we started finding the strange nuts on the ground.One half would be a perfect smiley face and the other half would be the shape of an owl face. I asked several people even in the neighborhood people that were original people that lived here and got various answers. My father did say black walnut but when I first looked for black Walma I saw the green husk so I figured can’t be and I continued my search until today when I saw your black in the picture of the inside of the black walnut and immediately recognized that I will shape face so I have to say thank you very much. Although I imagine ours are very old we do have a squirrel the daily brings one out and he is kind enough to open & eat it while sitting in our Massive maple tree that my grandparents planted. Each time I find a perfectly opened nut I look up & say Thank you to my grandparents. Below are the pics of the Only Way we can enjoy Black Walnuts b/c they are So Old they ALL have parasites in them & Have to be sprayed & washed Before I & my young son bring them in. I spent Too many years working in a Laboratory I guess? (plus the squirrels are holding on to The CashLoad of them) lol.
Unfortunately I was unable to add a pic to my post. I Do Apologize.
This is a black walnut (any nuts with interchangeable heads) cracker that works beautifully.
https://www.grandpasgoodygetter.com/
I hull with a conduit clamp and rubber mallet. Goes fast and easy. Then I hang the nuts in onion sacks – cool cellar. I am just cracking nuts from last years harvest.
I would like to add that of late I’ve discovered a couple of tools that make removing the nut meat from the shells a bit easier.
Once I crack them with a hammer I go at the shell fragments with a pair of welders heavy duty wire cutters and a dental pick. (Safety glasses recommended.) I now end up with more and larger pieces than before. And the work goes faster.
So much so that last year I made a large batch of chocolate chip oatmeal cookies with black walnuts and passed them about to family and friends rather than eat them all myself.
I husk my walnuts this way. They will be absolutely clean! Make or find a wire container with about a 1 inch mesh. Don’t put too many walnuts in, then fire up the power washer and have at them. CLEAN! I let them dry over the winter, then crack them whenever you want some.
Do you let them age awhile after you crack them open? Also, how do you store them during that aging time? Thanks for any help… Our trees are loaded this year!
Kris: Yes. After they come out of the hulls I let them dry for at least a few weeks. They store in the shells for a year.
I’ve just enjoyed an hour of fun reading. We have a gazillion black walnut trees – free for the pick-up, and dyers in Ann Arbor do use them for dyeing yarn. I am a certified fiber artist and have taught spinning and natural dyeing for years. We still harvest about 20 gallons of nuts for personal use, eating and dyeing. I’m 80 years old and still love the challenge of getting enough nutmeats for baking and eating. The H&C cracker is the best one and we have used ours for over 10 years, and find the corn sheller exhausting, but it does work. We just run over them in our gravel driveway, soak the nuts and store until cured. I loved the live trap idea! Those buggers will find the nuts in the barn, so now we store them inside, as soon as they are dry.
in my experience, you need to let them age a while before you eat them.
Elaine: Yep. At least a few weeks.
JFTR: They are delicious raw right out of the green husk before they’ve oxidized. Try in a pasta tossed with fresh beefsteak tomatoes, cracked black pepper, and some chopped Italian parsley.
I just finished cracking and picking out the nuts. They are somewhat softer than I remember buying at the store. Should they be dried out now or should I have left them in the hull longer to dry more?
I have a huge black walnut tree in my back yard that produces lots of nuts every year. We never get a chance to harvest any nuts because every squirrel for 2 miles comes to our tree to eat them before they ever get to the ground. It is mid-Aug and already 1 or 2 is missing from the group of 3. They only eat 1/2 of the pre mature nut and then toss it to the grouned. Some just have teeth marks, and are tossed, are these any good? My question is for anybody that might have a good way to keep the squirrels out of the tree. So that I might be able to have some of the nuts this year.
We had two black walnut trees in our side yard. They must be very long lived as the house there was built in 1855. Of course, I don’t know when they were planted but I still live near the old house and one of them is still standing. This was when I was a kid 68 years ago. I believe that a tornado did the other one in.
Dad said to only pick up the ones with black hulls and let then sit for a while, then we’d get a 5lb. sledge hammer and crack ’em open on the driveway or the concrete garage floor. Took forever to pick out the meat.
I have a wonderful recipe for butterscotch refrigerator cookies using black walnuts.
I have three concrete blocks stacked up for dad to crack the black walnuts on in the garage. He uses a sturdy long old hat pin to dig out the nuts. He has a clean metal bird nest to shake out any dust or small pieces of hull. We are loving our countertop ice cream maker to make different varieties of black walnut ice cream. Lemon zest, with chocolate chip bits, and the black walnuts was fun and tasted great too. I’m anxious to try it with orange zest,a bit of maple, and the black nuts. We went online to check for nut buyers in the area in the fall. A local feed store has a nut huller out back, to take the hulls off before weighing the nuts to be sold. I give him some nuts, and he is willing to husk the nuts for our personal use. It works for us. Just be careful about where you dry your nuts out at, as the squirrels have a hey day for any unsecured walnuts, and they will eat through a sack quickly. I cover the nuts with a rack to prevent the squirrels being able to run off with their loot. I set them high on a trailer during the day in the sunlight to dry.
I recently became re-interested in black walnuts. I live in the Great Plains, and the black walnut is apparently the only native nut tree in my state. When I lived a few hundred miles south of here as a child, I and my siblings gathered black walnuts from beneath my grandfather’s tree, walked 20 feet to his old blacksmith bench, and cracked the beasties with an ancient vise. As an alternative I tried the old anvil and a hammer he had used, but found the vise much easier to control without damaging the nut meats.
Some years ago my mother bought a house in a small town in the eastern part of the state, and a few years before her death I moved out to her place to help her avoid having to live in a nursing home. There were two old black walnut trees in her yard, both probably approaching 100 years of age. The trees produced nuts pretty much every year, but I found them difficult to enjoy in any quantity due to the many well-documented characteristics of the species.
When Mom died, I moved back into a larger town, where I live now. I was goofing around one day and typed “black walnut cracker” into a search engine and found that there are several pretty good ones avaliable. I researched them pretty well and decided on the Hunt nut cracker from Des Moines, Iowa. I ordered one and it is an amazing thing. It really does crack them nicely. This fall I picked up some black walnuts, hulled them out on the driveway by roughing them with my shoes, and after a few weeks, started cracking them.
Of the approximately 5 gallons of nuts (after hulling), I have cracked and eaten all but about a dozen nuts. I’ve ordered more nuts from several sources, and expect to receive some between now and Christmas.
If you need a good black walnut cracker, Hunt makes a jim-dandy one. Heavy cast iron, with steel dies. Pull the lever down until it cracks just the amount you want. Can’t go wrong. I was discussing with the manufacturer about getting another one or two for other family members. He said that he can’t make any more until after February because the foundry that makes the cast iron parts are backlogged on production. But I’m thinking I’m placing an order for one or two more so they will be avaliable next fall.
The link that accompanies this response should take you to the H & C Nut Cracker Co. web site.
Check it out. It’s really a great machine.
I dont know why some people here think that water after you wash the walnut is toxic? We dye cloth and other stuff with that water. Let it boil and then you can dye things with that, so how come is toxic? It is not toxic.
Well, that water may well be toxic to plants. Walnuts have a chemical in them that kills competing plants around them. How much gets into the water you use to wash the nuts is unclear, but that’s probably where the notion comes from.
JFTR: Volunteer asparagus grows like gangbusters at the base of my black walnut trees here in Central CA. mountains. It’s delicious, too!
Hank,
Great soliloquy on the wonder that is the black walnut. Having just harvested about 10 bushels, I am sharing some of my own “lessons”
1. Wear those plastic rubber or latex gloves under the gloves you are going to de-husk with. Stains seep through leather too.
2. Blacktop and tractor tires. Spread your green, beige and black husks on some out-of-the-way blacktop or hard road surface. DON”t drive the car or truck over them. Instead, use the tractor. The tires are softer and don’t crack so many nuts, and the large tread contours are much better at removing the husks that a knife or other implements. (There is an added benefit of making the road look like it was just re-tarred…)
3. You CAN wash out your wet-stained fabric or leather gloves. Immediately get them soaking in a bucket with dish detergent and water. SOAKING. Overnight. The gloves actually WILL come clean.
4. Drying the de-husked nuts. Critical. The longer the better. But every furry nut forager wants what you have. My neighbor fills her live animal trap with the nuts and seals the door shut! Good air flow, can sit in the sun safely and the squirrels can’t get to them! (She’s learned a lot in her 80+ years. I thought this was an inspired use of the wire cage.)
5. YES THERE ARE GOOD NUT CRACKERS! I will send pictures of TWO that I now swear by (not swear at). Black walnuts take a unique management of force and these machines (one very old and one new) both work well (and keep you from crushing fingers with that D*$% hammer!)
Black walnut cake, pound cake, pie… oh my…
We recently purchased several acres and have our own walnut trees, along with a shallow creek. I took the walnuts in the hull to the creek and rolled them around under my boot. The hull and gush of walnut stain simply flowed away, and as I rolled the nut around on the rock bed of the creek, I came up with a clean and hulled nut, and no mess! I could did around 5 or 6 a minute that way. I’ll wait until they cure a bit before cracking one. This is my first ever attempt so I can’t wait to see how it turns out.
Yummmmm I LOVE black walnuts!!! I also remember them from childhood, my grandparents farm, the burlap sack full of nuts and my dad spending Sunday afternoons watching football and picking out the meat!!! my favorite black walnut recipe is using them in my famous Kraft Marshmallow Fantasy fudge recipe!! And it only tastes right with black walnuts!! I scoff at those nasty English types!!!!