The Black Walnut - Native, Delicious and a Challenge to Open

Our delicious native Black walnuts are ready to be collected from woods and field edges around town. The trees are pretty easy to find since they tend to lose their leaves before all of the green tennis ball-sized nuts fall off. The nuts stand out quite distinctively on the leafless trees once you know what to look for. Since the trees are often large, and the nuts commonly too high to reach, now is the easiest time to gather them as many have fallen to the ground. Simply find a Black walnut tree and look on the ground around it, there should be plenty of nuts that have been dropped by the wind.

But finding and collecting them is the easy part. The delicious nut meat is shrouded in a soft outer husk that encapsulates a typical walnut looking shell, the kind that is familiar to anyone that has ever used a nutcracker to open an English walnut. But forget about the nutcracker for Black walnuts, the shell is ridiculously hard. The nut shell is so strong that it is actually used as an industrial abrasive to "sand" blast metal and stone, see www.hammonsproducts.com.  

There are all kinds of anecdotal ways that people profess is the best method to open a Black walnut, from running them over with the car, to a sledge hammer and an anvil. I've tried the car technique and it does work (at least to remove the outer husk), but a hammer will do the trick too. In any case, the first step is to remove the soft outer husk. A few good whacks with a hammer will usually make it easy to remove. But, like everything else about the Black walnut, even the soft outer husk offers a challenge. The husk smells very citrusy to me, but I know other people that find it unpleasant. Once the nuts have been exposed to the cold temperatures or laid on the ground for awhile, they also turn black. The black husk color does not mean the nut meat inside is bad. But the black husks have compounds in them that will indelibly stain fingers or anything else they come in contact with. The husk can also be made into dye and ink. I found a website that explains how to do it and it looks like a really cool project to try for anyone so inclined. They just turn this color after they have matured. Check it out here.

Once the soft outer husk is removed, the inner nut shell can be cracked with a good smack from a hammer. I typically wrap the nuts in newspaper and then hit them through it. Since they are very hard and round, if they aren't confined a hit that isn't perfect sends them shooting across the floor. Once they are cracked open the nut meat can be pried out of the shell just like an English walnut with a little metal pick. The meat is white and delicious, a bit more earthy and maybe a bit more oily than an English walnut, but much more rewarding after the challenge of finding them and cracking them open. Not to mention at nearly $15 a pound in the supermarket, the effort will save big bucks.

Visit the Friends of the East Brunswick Environmental Commission Online Parks Guide (http://www.friendsebec.com/ebparks.htm) for some ideas about where to look for Black walnut trees.

Happy gathering!