Black Walnuts and Alabama Pecans! 4 Things You Need For A Good Harvest!
Posted: Wednesday, December 01, 2010
by Bob Alexander
http://www.bluemarlinbob.com
For me, it is impossible to crack pecans and black walnuts without visualizing a side table covered with pecan pies and walnut cookies on Christmas Day. Over the years I have learned a few things about picking up nuts and preparing them to be eaten.
Patience: Picking up pecans from my trees is a trial and error process and requires patience and selectivity. Early in the harvesting season the bad nuts, ones that my be rotten or have worms in them, may be nonchalantly hanging out with a good one. It's hard to tell the good quality nuts from the inferior ones.
Obviously these nuts have to be thrown away. You have wasted only a little time by choosing the wrong pecan, but multiply those ten seconds by a bucket full of nuts. Before you know it an hour is gone that you will never get back. Be patient and pick the good ones.
Caution: Back home with buckets of pecans and black walnuts, the cracking process begins. The easiest nut to crack is the pecan. I have a hand operated nut cracker that splits the nut in half and gives me two perfect halves which I throw in a bowl, unless there is a worm in the shell, then I throw it in the waste bucket. Pecans are easy to crack, but a bucket full is a lot of pecans, and requires care in striking the nut.
Black walnuts are harder to separate from their shell. A conventional nutcracker simply will not work because their skin is too hard and thick to crack. I have figured out an almost ingenious way to crack these hard headed nuts. It's called a hammer.
I hold the nut with my left hand and place it on an anvil that I have on my workbench. With my left hand I hold a small three pound, short handled sledge hammer. With laser like accuracy I strike the walnut on the apex of the nut; at least most of the time I'm accurate. The hammer is heavy enough for the mind to dictate extreme caution in striking at something about the size of a golf ball when all of your fingers are exposed.
Endurance: Folks, whose attention span is that of a MTV watcher should forget about shelling pecans and especially black walnuts. Most of the pecans I crack just split themselves into two pieces. It's not that easy with a black walnut.
With walnuts, once I have them cracked, and I use a metal pick that looks somewhat like a knitting needle to remove the meat from the nut. The theory is that you insert the pick under a piece of fleshy walnut and it will just pop loose from its shell like a pecan. It doesn't work that way.
The shell of a walnut has no give in it like the thin shelled pecan. When you use the pick, most of the meat will crumble. Don't throw that away because a little of that walnut flour makes very tasty cookies.
Shelling pecans and walnuts is really an act of love. It takes work to be successful in the harvest. Working with a bunch of nuts is much like working with people. You have to have patience, caution and endurance. Most of all, you have to have love.
Bob Alexander is well experienced in outdoor cooking, gardening, fishing and leisure living. Bob is also the author and owner of this article. Visit his sites at:
http://www.redfishbob.com
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Top-level comments on this article: (2 total)I suppose to have the patience to make my way through a whole bucket, especially of walnuts, I'd have to get into a kind of dream-like, meditative state. Which could be a problem, with the hammer and digits...Jennifer, you're right, but it helps you to focus on what you're doing at the moment. None of this thinking about tomorrow while you're smashing walnuts.
I only know how to eat pecans and other nuts from the packet ready to eat had you not revealed the tough process of cracking them from their shells freshly Bob, who cares how because I don't have a pecan or walnut tree to bear me nuts.Hilda, I do it because it has a certain entertainment value. I don't like to have idle time.
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