Cracking Black Walnuts...don't Smash Your Fingers!

Pecan pies and black walnut cookies are my favorite snacks. Preparing the nuts to be eaten is one of the things I've learned to enjoy.

Patience: Picking up pecans from my trees is a trial and error process and requires patience and selectivity. Early in the harvesting season the bad nuts, ones that my be rotten or have worms in them, may be nonchalantly hanging out with a good one. It's hard to tell the good quality nuts from the inferior ones.

Select the right one and all you have to do when you get home is crack and shell the pecan. Pick the wrong one and you may break the nut apart to find a fat little yellow pecan worm that had been happily munching on the interior of the nut.

Obviously these nuts have to be thrown away. You have wasted only a little time by choosing the wrong pecan, but multiply those ten seconds by a bucket full of nuts. Before you know it an hour is gone that you will never get back. Be patient and pick the good ones.

Caution: Back home with buckets of pecans and black walnuts, the cracking process begins. The easiest nut to crack is the pecan. I have a hand operated nut cracker that splits the nut in half and gives me two perfect halves which I throw in a bowl, unless there is a worm in the shell, then I throw it in the waste bucket. Pecans are easy to crack, but a bucket full is a lot of pecans, and requires care in striking the nut.

I have figured out an almost ingenious way to separate the nut meat from a black walnut shell. I use a small sledge hammer. These nuts are much too hard to crack with a conventional pecan cracker.

I hold the nut with my left hand and place it on an anvil that I have on my workbench. With my left hand I hold a small three pound, short handled sledge hammer. With laser like accuracy I strike the walnut on the apex of the nut; at least most of the time I'm accurate. The hammer is heavy enough for the mind to dictate extreme caution in striking at something about the size of a golf ball when all of your fingers are exposed.

Endurance: Folks, whose attention span is that of a MTV watcher should forget about shelling pecans and especially black walnuts. Most of the pecans I crack just split themselves into two pieces. It's not that easy with a black walnut.

With walnuts, once I have them cracked, and I use a metal pick that looks somewhat like a knitting needle to remove the meat from the nut. The theory is that you insert the pick under a piece of fleshy walnut and it will just pop loose from its shell like a pecan. It doesn't work that way.

The shell of a walnut has no give in it like the thin shelled pecan. When you use the pick, most of the meat will crumble. Don't throw that away because a little of that walnut flour makes very tasty cookies.Shelling pecans and walnuts is really an act of love. It takes work to be successful in the harvest. Working with a bunch of nuts is much like working with people. You have to have patience, caution and endurance. Most of all, you have to have love.