Black walnuts are nutritious and well worth the effort to gather. This is a messy activity, so be sure to wear old clothes, old sneakers and cover your hands with gloves, unless you want to be dye-stained for several weeks.
Here’s what the tree looks like:
Here’s a closeup of the branch and the nut:
If you have a paved, flat driveway and an area with a picnic table, it’s easier to clean a large quantity of nuts.
These instructions come from my foraging buddy, George Johanson, who not only works hard to harvest these treats, but shares them with everyone he meets.
Materials:
- 2 pair rubber gloves
- old clothes
- sneakers or work boots
- wire brush
- flat, black-topped area to remove hulls
- flat table tops to clean shells
1. Look for mature nuts, preferably with green hulls. You can gather them from the ground, or in some cases, knock them from the tree branches. The nuts with black hulls are older and the liquid in some of these nuts may penetrate the nut shell, changing the taste. You may want to remove a few hulls and crack the nut open to ensure there is nut meat.
2. Using your work gloves, gather a large quantity of nuts and spread them out on a flat, black-topped area.
3. Using your feet stomp and twist on each nut until the hulls come loose. Discard the hulls in a compost pile or in the woods.
4. Using gloved hands, spread the nuts out on a picnic table or large, flat area. Scrub each nut with a wire brush to remove the bits of hull wedged in the crevices.
5. Spread cleaned nuts out to dry so that they are not touching. If you are doing this outdoors, you need to be sure they are in a sunny spot, protected from animals.
6. Once the shells are dry, let the nuts cure for 5-6 weeks. You’ll notice that when you shell a fresh nut, the nut meat is rubbery. The curing lets the nut meat get firm.
Gathering, hulling and cleaning black walnuts (and butternuts, if you can find them) is labor intensive. But once cleaned and cured, they will last for a year or more - if you can refrain from eating them that long.