My wife gave me some goodies for Valentine’s Day and among them was a bag of unsalted roasted peanuts in the shell. I love 'em. But in the process of getting the nuts out of their shells and peeling those skins off of them and popping them into my mouth, I thought back to the days when my brother and I would sit out in the back yard in the fall and eat pecans until we could barely walk.
I have had some experience shelling/cracking/getting at the goodies in almonds, pistachios, Brazil nuts, walnuts, “scalybarks” (hickory nuts) and maybe some others I’ve forgotten at the moment. The idea for this thread is this:
If you were to be paid by the pound for shelled nutmeats, and were timed in the process of getting those nuts “ready to eat” and were limited to an eight-hour period, what nut(s) would you want to be working with?
Said another way, which nuts provide the best return for the energy required to get at them?
Side topics:
Have you ever shelled cashews, macadamias or other exotic nuts?
What’s your favorite nut to eat without having extra processing (roasting, salting or some other treatment) added?
What nuts are available in your area fruit stands? (Don’t count the ones you can get at supermarkets since they’re brought in from distant locations.)
I don’t have a lot of experience in nut cracking. Although, I think peanuts and pistachios are pretty easy. (I don’t worry about the skin on the peanuts, though.) However, I just wanted to say that I bought some hazel nuts recently. Those things are like little Fort Knoxes. Too little force, and they wouldn’t open. But when you apply enough force to get the shell to crack, you would smash the whole thing to smithereens.
That’s one of the issues I hope the OP suggests. Being able to buy nuts already shelled, salted or otherwise jazzed up, gets us jaded to the difficulties involved in getting them that way. Of course, costs reflect to some degree those problems in processing.
If you hate working with hazel nuts, try to get your hands on some “scalybarks” (called that because the Shagbark and Scalybark Hickories that produce those nuts have scaly bark) and see if you can get an unbroken nutmeat out. If you can, you have a nut that’s even tastier (to me, at least) than a pecan. FWIW, Pecans are related to Hickories.
Given that raw cashews are fairly toxic, and surrounded in their pods by caustic fluid, I think it’s best to leave that particular nut to someone else:
I grew up in N.E. Ohio and there were a couple of black walnut trees in the area near my home. The nutmeats are delicious, but getting to them is a real chore. They fall from the tree in a rind that will leave your hands stained black for days. Once you get the nut out it’s a bear to crack the thing, it almost as if it were made of cast iron. Cracking the shell often smashes the nutmeat, so you have to pick it out very carefully. It’s a lot of work, but it’s one of the best nuts you’ll ever enjoy. It’s been decades since I’ve tasted one, but I would love to try them again.
And the absolute worst would have to be Brazil Nuts. Tough as stones and damn near impossible to get a whole nut out of the shell without breaking it to pieces.
It hasn’t been all that long ago that I learned that coconuts are indeed nuts! They are hard to open for sure, especially (a la Survivor) if you don’t have a machete or a hatchet.
What other weirdo nuts are there of the edible kind?
I can tear through pistachio nuts. They’re my nut of choice at baseball games.
Anyway, I travelled to Hawaii once and stayed on a property that was primarily a macademia nut farm. They also grew Kona coffee, and an assortment of tropical fruits.
The driveway was literally – yes, I mean literally – paved with them. We’d sit on the back porch and crack them endlessly with that crazy device you see there. If the shell is dry enough, it cracks right off.
After you get the nut, they’re somewhat flavorless and chewy so you need to roast them.
We tried roasting them according to the property owner’s instructions and they would burn before they would dry out (like 350 for 15 minutes). So I talked to this nut/coffee farmer on the island, and she told me that she roasted her nuts for 18 hours at about 175 degrees. Bingo.
We had to wait for the first batch, but after that, we basically had the oven going the rest of the trip.
See if this link works for an album of “nut shots”.
Walnuts… but just for the pure enjoyment that come from people’s eyes when they see me crack them with one hand.
Oh you’re saying “LOTS of people can crack walnuts by crushing one against another in their hands.”
Well, I can do them one-at-a-time…with one hand…either hand.
You have obviously never tried to shell a Macadamia. I was hitting these with a hammer on a concrete slab, and the concrete was losing. I broke my way through several pieces of wood (as baseplates) to get through a bag of macadamias.
Completely worth it though.
In retrospect - I should have soaked and peeled them - the usual trick for hard-shelled nuts.
Have you ever used one of those toylike nutcrackers (the soldier looking dooey) to crack nuts? If so, what kind of nuts? Do the toys hold up well after cracking a few nuts?
Wasn’t it Jeff Foxworthy who said that he thought a “nutcracker” was something you did off the high dive?
My in-laws grow pecans on their farm – I mean, it’s a farm, but not a pecan farm, they produce just enough pecans for personal use and maybe sell any extra at the farmstand, but it’s not the main business of the farm. Anyway, I was visiting once when the pecans were brought in, and the family would sit around shelling them for hours while watching TV or whatever. I thought I’d help out, and the first 1/2 or so was okay, and then it was living hell. I think I can shell the same amount of pecans in one hour that I can in eight hours - after one hour, I can’t shell any.
It occurs to me that I have no idea at all what nuts are grown locally, it seems like I can get just about any kind at the stands in my area.
