I cracked the last of my black walnuts I foraged 2 years ago. There were only a few that had spoiled, which is pretty amazing. We root cellared them. Its a great fat that can be saved for a really long time without a lot of preservation.
I bought a black walnut cracker this year, which has changed the game. Previously I used a hammer and towel. This amount would have taken about 2 hours. With the cracker, it took me 40 minutes.
Right now, it’s black walnut season in NE Tennessee! So many people happy to give them away, as they are a nuisance to most people. We pulled about 50 gallons of the nuts so far, but are looking for more spots around us that have good sized nuts.
What are some ways we can incorporate foraging meaningfully into life? That’s the question I’ve been looking to answer. We’ve foraged a lot, but I’ve struggled to figure out how to meaningfully bring it into my families diet.
EDIT: Added a terrible pic of the black walnut cracker. The one I bought is the Grandpa’s Goody Getter. I also bought the other anvils, so this should be able to crack just about any nut I can find.
We used to have a tree, and man those things were a pain to crack. How does the cracker work?
It’s the grandpa’s goody getter. I was skeptical at first, cause I saw it in an endorsement from the youtuber Feral Foraging.
It’s pretty amazing, mechanically speaking. It has an upper and lower jaw that hold the nut. I haven’t figured out there details, but the system is able to size for the individual nut, so the power gets delivered when it meets resistance. It cracks the nut along the central pillar, and then somehow doesn’t release all the pressure by smashing the cracked nut.
It was expensive, but I plan on sharing it with several other foragers so more people can get use out of it.
That’s awesome. Would have been very useful when I young.
Lol im in the same neighborhood and was just trimming a walnut tree back from my roof earlier
If you find any good ways to use em maybe ill bother with them instead of just chucking them into my woods
We don’t drink either, so nocino or liqueur isn’t something I’ve tried.
Some things we have done with them:
- Black Walnut and Caramel Ice Cream
- Black Walnut and Apple Muffins
- Black Walnut Pie (Pecan pie recipe, with a substitute)
I liked all of them, but the pie was my favorite. We used sorghum for some of the sugars and it paired really well with the black walnuts. Normal pecan pie pales in comparison for me.
You can make a liqueur from them
Neat. I dont drink tho
I will often toss a handful of foraged stuff into a stew - anything from hawthorn berries over nuts to leaves and shoots. These days I’m collecting lamb’s quarters seeds and will use them in my sourdough bread or sprinkled over anything I cook. It took a while to get away from the supermarket standard recipes and use the foraged stuff in my cooking. I often just go through the stuff I collected in the morning and combine randomly. Today we had a cooked-2-days everything stew and it was just glorious! I don’t think there was anything from the store in there, apart from the salt - almost all we eat is home-raised, home-grown or foraged. Can’t help but feel a little smug about this. Family used to tell me it was too difficult to be self-sufficient, but after mastering the learning curve I have better food than ever available all year round and it costs me very little. Disclaimer: this only works well for people who like to spend time outdoors.
Also for learning more I find that ethnobotanical studies are treasures of knowledge around foraged stuff and traditional recipes. Check out this one for lots of great gardening advice.
My loved ones are not all openminded to eat a stew of what I forgage. So my strategy these days is to complete my bought ingredients with forage ones.
I’m making a bread with a bit of neetle. I add a few nuts or fruit to my musli, I spice up my juice or smoothies. It also help my not needing big forage session to get enough to eat.Thanks for the link! I’ve added it to my list of things to read.
The stew is a great idea! We’ve usually modified normal recipes, but maybe some more experimentation is in order.
We’ve been working on growing or foraging more to know how it works BEFORE we need it. it’s been quite a bit of work. We have 5 mouths to feed, so we pull from a lot of things so that we don’t over-harvest any one thing.
It gets easier with time. I’m doing the same, getting things in place before it gets too difficult to react. I’ve never really managed to enjoy black walnuts - I live on a farm full of black walnut trees, but to me they always taste a little weird, like already rancid. Anything I should know when harvesting them?
They are definitely a different taste. It’s a bit of a bitter, earthy taste to them. You can try to balance them out with a bit of sugar or salt to see if it swings the taste profile.
Biggest thing I can think of when harvesting: wear gloves, and know that it’s okay to get ones with blackened hulls as long as they aren’t moldy/rotten. Also, don’t let them sit in a bucket too long, as they will start molding.
They do take a bit of work to get to them. Here’s largely the process I followed from Feral Forager: youtube.com. In a nutshell:
- Find a good set of trees that are dropping the nuts
- Pick up as much as you have patience for. I don’t knock them off trees, because I trust the tree to know when the nut is finished
- Dehull them. I use Feral Foraging’s method. Make sure to wear medical gloves, or you will look like you’ve been rooting around in a fire pit! Also, do this fairly quickly, as the nuts will mold in their hulls.
- Wash them with a high-pressure hose or pressure washer
- Dry them on a rack of some kind
- Store them something that gets plenty of airflow
- Let them mellow for anywhere from 6 weeks to 6 months. I usually harvest this year and then start cracking from last year’s harvest. This time is important, as it lets the flavor develop
- Crack them, use them soon, or store them in the fridge for about a month.
Do you remove the hawthorn berries pips? I have millions of them and would love to make use of them.
When I just put a handful of berries in a stew - no, too much work. One just has to be a little careful when eating to not bite them. When adding them to a jam or make a medicinal syrup I run the cooked berries through a passe-vite (ricer in english?). This is my first year of making oxymel with the whole berries, I’ll report on that.
The hawthorn gives a bit of an uninviting impression at first, with it’s thorns and the too-small berries with their pips but I had to start using it for its medicinal value and now I just love my hawthorns - all parts are edible, so if leaves get mixed into the berries when harvesting it’s no problem, and nobody has to have the work to remove pips before cooking.
And I saw the first european walnut on the ground yesterday!
What does a black walnut cracker looks like?
I edited the post to have a picture of mine. It’s the Grandpa’s Goody Getter. I know there are other kinds, but I liked the approach of this one, and it requires no electricity, unlike some others.
This looks like a great machine.
