The 2009 Black Walnut Experience! 
(yes, really - exclamation point.)

Walnuts. Yes Walnuts. BLACK walnuts in fact (not English walnuts). Having been in an auto accident earlier this year, I find myself with more time on my hands than usual to do things I don't normally get (have) to do. However, as I start to do these things, I realize it's not so much that I haven't had to do them before as it is that I have been neglecting to do them. There is so much that needs to be done and only so many hours in the day.

Haven't been working with music too much lately. Really haven't felt like it. So as we all contemplate where life goes from here, let's let our heads rest and relax into the world of something I've been going on about in Livejournal for awhile......Black Walnuts. And here's how it goes:

Hi. I'm Jason. And these are my nuts. Below, you can still see the scar on my head from the accident I was in earlier this year. Yes, it pisses me off. But nothing I can do about it now, so let's crunch some walnuts.

First you have to collect the nuts. Below in the wheelbarrow, is not even half the walnuts we've picked up this year. This is the first time I've really gave walnuts serious attention so I'm kind of playing this by ear...as usual. I've read they taste best when you get them when they are green and just fallen to the ground. I'm not sure about this at the moment. But it seems that even after they have turned black and mushy like below, you can still gather them. In fact, the outer hull us much easier to remove when they are mushy like this, if not messy. Better wear gloves for this part or your hands will stain and stay that way for awhile.

I use a pair of rubber gloves with a leather glove on my left hand. I wear the leather glove because I use a box cutter to scrape off the hull and sometimes I hit my left hand - not getting a deep cut or anything. But I tried with only rubber gloves at first and I kept cutting the left hand rubber glove rendering it useless. I don't mind the stains though.

I'm not sure how walnuts are commercially processed and haven't had the time to look it up. It's either sit here studying it all day or just do it with what I already know. There are SO MANY walnuts and so little time. We have five walnut trees and these are the nuts from only one of them.

 I've heard of people running over these things with a car to remove either the hulls or the shells themselves but that just sounds ridiculous and by the way I don't want to buy new tires. Black walnut shells are HARD and SHARP when broken and running over them with a car just sounds messy and I just don't think I would like the taste of tire with my walnuts.

ANYhow.  Some people put them in water after this and the ones that float they throw away and the rest are keepers. Honestly, I've read a dozen ways to handle walnuts at this point and many of them seem pointless. There's no need to pick out the bad ones after you've gone to the trouble of de-husking them. You'll find the bad ones easy enough when you go to shell them. In fact, most of the bad ones are very light (thus they float) so just picking one up to remove the shell will almost immediately tell you if it's good or bad. So in my opinion, don't bother with  floating them.

It would be nice, however if you had a creek or river nearby, because you can then use a wire basket to sink the walnuts and alot of the broken hulls and messy black gunk (as well as bad nuts) will float away and you can just pick the basket right back up out of the water. But the fact is, if you want to process your own black walnuts, you're just going to accept the fact that it's just going to be a tedious and time consuming endeavor. But I enjoy being outdoors and if you like gardening anyway, it's a good time of year since most of the harvesting of other garden stuff is done by now. In fact, it's been in the 70's for a few days here in...NOVEMBER! Nice weather for this time of year.

Here is what I do with them after I remove the hulls. I wash them down with a water hose to remove most of the still-attached black gunk and put them in potato bags to dry. I've read that the toxin in walnuts makes it difficult for other plants to grow, so when I remove the hulls, I toss them in a bucket and take them to my brush pile.

So as for the washing of the nuts part - I'm not sure this is entirely necessary since they are going to dry anyway but I have yet to NOT wash them off just to see what happens. Maybe I'll try that in the next few days. I imagine they'll just have a little more dried gunk on them which won't be nearly as messy when it wasn't dry.

I've also read people let these things dry anywhere from a week to a month. Who knows who's right? There again, I think that is something I will just learn over time if I continue doing this every year. I also hope to come up with faster ways of getting the job done - like using one of them eeeelectric potato peelers or something...or not.

But there seems to be little information or equipment on commercial walnut processing but I'm sure it's out there (like this place - http://www.wizardmanufacturing.com/). There again, it's either get this year's crop done or spend all day studying about it. It's just interesting because have you seen the price of a bag of black walnuts? That could be a lucrative business although at the rate I'm going, I would probably be earning minimum wage.

SO - so far, as I've said, I've been washing them off. I was using a bucket and just rolling them around and dumping out the water a few times. Then I decided to put them in the potato bags FIRST and wash them off as they are hanging there. Again, I may skip the washing part just to see what happens. I imagine washing is more important for commercial processing since the entire process gets done much more quickly than by hand.

Anyway, the bags below are set to dry and the potato bags serve this purpose well. I've been letting them dry for about two weeks. They seem to do fine for that amount of time. And I've read, you can actually store them this way for up to two years. But I don't know.

Let's get crackin'!  Below is the result of what I've learned for this year. I've tried using a vise to crack them open. But they are so messy with shell fragments going everywhere. And besides the vise is mounted in my garage for automotive purposes and that is where I DON'T want walnut shells. And you have to place the nut in the vise, screw it in until the nut cracks, screw it out, place each of the fragments in, screw it back in...etc..  So the vise is just really not convenient and actually more time consuming.

Besides, I've found that black walnuts usually end up breaking into quarters - four separate sections from which you have to somehow get the nut meat out. It is for that reason, I've settled on a big hammer and a pair of pliers. Some people say using a hammer messes up the nut meats but I say BAH to them. It's all about technique. As I mentioned to someone earlier, it's not so much about cracking the walnuts as it is about beating them into submission.

What I mean by that is when you start to crack one open, don't use every muscle in your body to demolish the nut. I actually just hit it pretty firmly until I hear a distinctive, different-sounding *crack* that tells me the shell is cracked but not yet totally broken. At that point, I start tapping it lightly (sort of) and try to hit it on what I know are the four sections that will need further cracking. Finally the thing falls apart. Sometimes part of the nut meats just fall out at this point, sometimes not. It's really doesn't take as long as this paragraph is making it sound.

Once the nut falls apart, instead of using a nut pick to pick the nut out, 99% of the time I use the pliers to break open more of the separated sections of shell, thus giving the nut meats more of a chance to survive intact and thus in the largest pieces possible.  This usually works with one squeeze of the pliers.

As you can see below, I've dumped the dried nuts into a bucket...err flowerpot in this case. And I use a large rock on which to crack them. In my opinion, this works great. At first I was throwing the broken shells into a bucket and taking it to the brush pile. But I've stopped worrying about that and let them fall where they may since this is not an area where I mow or ever walk barefoot.  Or walk at all for that matter, even with shoes on.  Seriously, those shards will penetrate right through your shoes and into your heart, possibly into your brain and you WILL DIE!  Or not.  Ok then.

Also, after cracking several black walnuts, inevitably there will be tiny pieces of walnut meat that are not worth picking up and if you do they will likely have bits of shell or dirt or leaves or whatever sticking to them, so I leave them for the squirrels. And they DO find them. (I'm not worried if the squirrels find the walnuts I'm working on - trust me there's MORE than enough to go around for us all and I won't miss the few the squirrels can collect, in addition to the ones they collect that I just don't have the time to pick up.)

Below is what I'm talking about when I say I large pieces. Black walnuts usually break into four sections. But they really form in two sections. It's just that that middle part breaks most of the time leaving you with still plenty big pieces as black walnuts go. I like this picture.  =D

But as you can see below, it is STILL possible to get an unbroken nut meat from a black walnut to remain intact. It's kind of like finding a four leaf clover. Can you do this? It's fun to try until you realize you're wasting time trying to get a piece out like this since there's tons of walnuts left to do.

You've got work to do walnut slave! Get back to work!!

Really - Amber likes black walnuts too. Funny dog.

And after all this, here is the delicious result. That bowl of freakin'-delicious black walnuts took no small amount of time to do. But if you just break the process up into various stages, it's not so bad. There in the bowl is my not-so-often-used nut pick. But it does come in handy sometimes.

I've read that to preserve black walnut meats at this point, you can either cook them for a few minutes if you plan to store them at room temperature, store them in the refrigerator if you plan to use them in a few weeks, or you can store them up to the magical number of two years if you freeze them. Again, I haven't spent two years experimenting with them yet so who knows.

But there ya go!

Black Walnuts!

WHEEEEEEEEEEE!!!