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Location: somewhere between Lk. Michigan & Lk. Huron
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When I lived to home, we had a walnut tree. After collecting the walnuts in a pail, we poured them back out in our dirt driveway, left them there for driving over with the car, that helped shuck them, from there we gathered them back up in the pail, & stored them over winter, I believe by Summer they would be ready to crack open for eating.
To open and remove the meat from a black walnut you will need:
Anvil+sledge hammer or
Bench mounted vice+Icepick
Hence the development of the 'English walnut'. They can be opened with less than super human effort.
Black walnuts are quite delicious, but removing them from from their bullet-proof shells and interior bark is all but impossible. You virtually have to crush the whole nut into smithereens and scape up the resultant nut crumbs (hoping to exclude any of the inside shell bits).
Black walnuts are best left to squirrels. They've got the mojo.
Yes, they have to dry out a bit, then husk them (they stain like crazy, the car idea is a good one), then hammer them open, then pick out the bitter little nuggets !
Drill a large hole, about the size of the nut, in a sturdy board. Then just hammer the nuts through the board. That will remove the outer shells. Don’t forget to wear rubber gloves - they will stain your fingers brown. Then you can leave them to dry out before harvesting the fruit. You don’t get a lot of meat out of the nuts. But it is very good and has it’s own great flavoring to eat or add to recipes.
Driving over the nuts works on dirt roads. But it can destroy the nuts on paved roads.
We used to lay the nuts flat on a board in the yard. The green outer covering eventually turned brown and soft. (This is the staining part, so wear your rubber gloves) Then we put them in the driveway. When the most of the outer covering was gone, we put them back on the board and hosed them off to get to the hard shell. Cracking them with a hammer and picking out the meat was an ongoing job. Then we sold them to a neighbor lady who was happy to pay. As I recall, it was about $2.00 for a pint jar, which was a fortune 65 years ago.
The black walnut has a distinctive flavor - more so than the English walnut. It just takes so much work that few people are willing to do it.
The jugulon from the black walnut tree is poisonous to many other plants and some animals; so, be careful with those black walnut husks. It will require a heavy duty nut cracker to break those shells as they are much thicker than those of the english walnuts.
In my area there is a company which buys the black walnuts in the husk. If your time is worth more than the nuts and you have such a black walnut industry in your state, this may be the way to go and then purchase the processed product.
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