Transcription
I'm going to show you the fastest and easiest way to gather and clean thousands of black walnuts so you can enjoy this nutritious and delicious wild food year round. Black walnuts may be the healthiest nut on the planet. They are loaded with protein and beneficial minerals, but the difficulty with them is that they can be quite tedious to gather, hull, and clean.
So I have spent many dozens of hours researching and rigorously experimenting and testing with every single method that I could find so that by the end of the video you are going to learn exactly what actually does and does not work. And after that I'm going to show you some pretty amazing tricks for processing them and cracking them efficiently. Plus a bonus method for black walnut that isn't a possibility for most wild foods. And everything that you learn in this video is accessible to everyone. We aren't going to be using any heavy machinery or anything like that, but there is one small optional power tool that I will recommend later on in the video.
And another great thing about black walnut for everyone is that in terms of look-alikes for the actual nuts, the only thing that I can think of that even kind of remotely looks like black walnut would be something like horse chestnut, which are toxic. But as soon as you were to break into the whole of those, you would see that they are completely different on the inside. They look a lot more like a chestnut. Other than that we have butternut, which is actually a cousin to black walnut. And they kind of look like an elongated version of it. But for those, you can also process them and eat them exactly the same way as what I'm going to show you in this video.
This is what black walnut looks like when they fall right off of the tree. They kind of remind me of those little, those Russian nesting dolls, you know. So they have this outer green part right here. That is just the outer hole. And that will break away and that'll reveal a little shell on the inside right there. And then within that shell is the nut meat. And that is the part that we're really after. You can handle the fresh outer green holes right there with your bare hands as you see. But if you break into them or if they start to age and decompose, then if you touch them with your bare skin, it's going to dye your skin a very dark color. You can see here on my hands, they've finally started to go away. But in some of the footage, you'll notice that my hands are really, really dark. They will stain them for a very long time. So I usually like or I try to handle them with gloves if I can.
But how will we consistently find productive trees that we can gather from? Black walnut trees can grow on the west coast of North America as well as even Europe. But they're most abundant in their native range, which is central and eastern North America. But for actually finding the nuts, don't make the mistake of looking for them in the woods. Sure, you'll find a lot of walnut trees there. However, in a situation like this, a densely packed forest, black walnut trees won't have nearly enough sunlight that they need to fruit vigorously. And even if they do fruit kind of well, they'll be really tough to gather from the cluttered forest floor. So I like to gather them along forest edges or honestly, just around my neighborhood where I find more than I could possibly ever use myself. Trust me, 90% of the people are more than happy that you are there wanting to pick up the black walnuts in their yard.
With black walnut, they are definitely easiest to find when the nuts are more mature or when they fall into the ground. A lot of the time later into the season for black walnut, most of the leaves from the tree will fall down, but the nuts will remain attached. And in that form, honestly, you could spot them from practically miles and miles away. I mean, just look at how much they stand out right here. They look like Christmas tree ornaments. They typically start to fall in the second half of September, but the season can extend well into November. And don't worry about remembering all of that because the timing window for black walnut and dozens of other important wild foods can be found in my interactive forgers calendar.
Okay, so you found loads of black walnuts on the ground, but before you rush in and start gathering all the ones that you can see, it's actually really important to test the nuts first. You see black walnut, they vary tremendously in their size and more importantly in the shell thickness. So let me show you what I'm going to do here. I'm just going to take first a mallet to pop the hole off. And I'll explain more about how we actually do that efficiently in a second. And then I'm going to take a hammer and I'm going to try to crack it. Okay, so if you had a tough time with that and all that you have to crack them is a hammer and you've gathered a bunch of thick shelled nuts, then you're going to be in for a really rough time once you actually get to cracking them. However, you don't really need to worry about all of this if you have a quality walnut cracker like the Grandpa's Good To Getter right here, which will make light work of even the thickest shells. If you really do want to make black walnuts a meaningful part of your diet, this tool right here, Made in America, built by an American small business is a really vital investment. I'm telling you, you will not regret getting one of these things. And you can also use my code, ferro24, to get $10 off your purchase.
So we found a bunch and we've tested them. Now things are getting more interesting. The question is, how are we going to pick all of them up and transport them with us? If you have the space, just picking them all up whole is definitely the fastest method. And if you're gathering them at a good fresh stage, then you won't have to deal with any of the inkyness getting into your vehicle. But for me, I like to use a nut roller like this thing right here. For my goals, a tool like this makes my job so, so much easier. They pick up walnuts like a dream. You can see in the footage right here, gathering this whole storage bucket full of black walnuts took me like 10 to 15 minutes and no effort whatsoever. The one that I'm holding right here is really sturdy and well built. I'll put a link to it in the description along with all the products that I'm recommending in this video. None of which by the way, are sponsoring this video. I've actually tested and used all of them and I'm just recommending them to you because they really do work.
Once you have gathered all of them, if you aren't going to process them right away, then don't leave them in a situation at this point where they're going to start to dry. That's only going to make hulling down the line a lot more difficult. I usually keep them in a closed container like this for about up to a week or so, but you can hull them anytime in that window. If they have started to dry or when I gathered them, they were already really dry, then I will just submerge all of them in water for about an hour or so before I actually begin the process of hulling them.
I got a great question from you guys about what the hole should look like when you actually go to gather them. Should they be nice and green like this or should they be maybe a bit more dark or a bit more inky? What I would tell you is gather the holes the way they are when you find them. You definitely don't need to wait for them to disintegrate more or anything like that. If you find them really fresh, then it is a little bit easier because you can handle them with your bare hands and you don't need to worry about getting all inky and dirty. Because I'm looking for them at the beginning of their season, I gather them fresh, but if you find them and they're more inky, you can gather those too. It's perfectly fine. In terms of any difference in flavor, I haven't really noticed that before. The real important part is getting them curing quickly and curing them thoroughly, but I'll try to do more rigorous experimentation with this in the future.
But what is the best way to hull them? How do we actually get these green husks off? There are a ton of videos and articles online out there that show you various methods, but most of them fail for one of two reasons. The first one is that when you actually time them, they aren't really that efficient in the end. Or two, they're inaccessible to 99% of people. Like yes, we could build a really cool black walnut huller with heavy machinery, but that is not an option for most of us, including me right now. So first what I'm going to show you is the fastest way that you can hull black walnuts without any additional mechanized tools whatsoever. And no, it isn't driving over them with your car, which is actually one of the most inefficient and ineffective methods despite it being really, really popular. When you actually get down to trying it and timing it, the car method becomes pretty tedious. You need to pour all of them out. You need to line them up on the tires, and then you need to drive over them and drive back over them. Then you need to find the ones that you've missed and maybe you drive over them again or with the ones you missed, you end up smashing them anyway. And often the weight of the vehicle will introduce small cracks into the shells that will lead to the walnut spoiling much more quickly. So you're going to lose a lot of your harvest. Personally, I don't think you need to worry about bothering with this method.
Here is what you do. Spread them out and smash them. That's all that there is to it. You can do this simply by stepping on them. Or what I like to do is I like to get a long branch like this where I've put a flat bottom on it so that I can use my upper body and I can hit them really precisely. That means I don't have to be bending over because another tool that you can use is a simple mallet, which is really, really good. It distributes the force very evenly over the shell, which leads to smashing it but not cracking the shells, which is very important again. In my testing with Holing 40 Walnuts, this method was about over a minute faster than using one of these things right here, which look really nifty and they look like they're going to work really well. But when you get down to it, one, it's slower. And two, when you press the walnut through the hole, inevitably there's going to be one side of it that remains on and it's really difficult down the line to get that off when you're fully cleaning them. So I wouldn't try this one either. If you don't have any tools, just smash them. Trust me, you're going to get through way more than you might think.
With all the holes removed, now we need to clean them. And to do this, I throw them into a five gallon bucket and I'll fill it up with water until it's a little bit over the walnuts and I'll stir it around usually with the stick right here to break the rest of the holes off as they grind over each other. But there is an additional tool that can make all of this faster, way faster. This is a small power tool that I think is reasonable for most people to get, especially if you are serious about gathering black walnuts. And it is a corded drill and a mud mixer. With these two tools right here, I can hull over 200 black walnuts in under 10 minutes with very little effort expended. And if you do try this, then you want to get this mud mixer right here. As you can see, I tested a bunch of them and this one blew them all out of the water. The way that it's really flat and has a low profile means that it isn't being hindered by all the other walnuts so much. And so it can even work with a more low power drill. But you definitely do want to go with a corded drill for this and not a cordless.
So here's the method. We're going to take our black walnuts. I usually recommend batches of around 200 or so. And we're going to throw them into a clean garbage bin. And then we're going to fill it up with water until there's about two inches between the black walnut holes and the bottom of the bucket. They do float. And then we're going to insert the mixer and let the drill run. This is why you want to wear clothes when you're doing this that you don't mind getting a little bit stained. When I was initially testing this, I thought that it was just not working. Like I would run it for a whole minute and a half and nothing was happening. All the holes remained intact. But this is one of those things where you really just trust the process. Kind of after that, all of a sudden, all the holes begin to disintegrate and they do so very quickly. And then it'll start to get really thick and soupy just like this right here. But you want to keep on pushing through that. Usually after about four minutes, 95% of them or so are completely hulled.
So I'm going to dump all the contents of this through a filter that has really large holes in them to catch the walnut shells, but let all the bits of the broken up hole pass through. These right here are the ones that I use and you give them a few shakes and all those holes start to fall through really quick. And then I'm just going to spray them all down after the holes have fallen through. They're looking really good. After all of them are hulled, what I normally do is I'll take them and I'll throw them back in the container. And then I'll fill this back up with water and I'll add enough water so that the floaters will rise to the top. Many nuts that float are usually bad nuts that we don't want to have to deal with cracking later on. So I just discard those. Now what I'm going to do is I'm going to run the drill one more time, which is just going to give them a good final clean before we'll dump it all off again. Dumps off one more time. This is what my black walnuts look like after that final wash. Now one thing that you'll notice is that they aren't like 100% clean. There's still tiny bits of the hole that's a bit stuck in the tiny grooves of the shell. Personally for me, I don't really worry about getting them perfectly squeaky clean. You can get a pressure washer if you want to and get them completely 1000% clean, but that's another tool that you have to buy that's more effort that you have to put in, which for me just isn't really worth it in the end. You'll actually see in my next video that any of those tiny little dusty bits of the hole that are stuck in there are going to be very easily sorted out from the nut meat from the process that we'll do for cracking and sorting. And by the way, in the pinned comment, you can find the link that you can use where I'll send you a ridiculously detailed version of the workflow that I'm showcasing in this video.
Oh, and you're going to end up with a bunch of this extra whole material right there from all the cleaning that we just did on them. So what are we going to do with all of these? There's a lot of fear about these husks right here killing all the plants around them where they drop, which can happen with some plants to a certain extent. This is due to a chemical in the holes called juglone, but juglone does not affect all plants. There are many plants, shrubs and trees out there like black raspberry or wild plum or onions just to name a few that are not affected by juglone. And in addition, juglone breaks down over time and these holes are really rich in nitrogen. So I'm going to be dropping them in an area where there aren't many plants growing right now that I want to add some organic matter to. But you can also use them as a really great ingredient for doing things like hot composting, which will break down the chemicals by the time that they're ready to put into your garden. Some of you also might be wondering like, can we use these excess holes for herbal applications? And for me personally, if I'm going to prepare the holes for ingestion, then I'll seek them out for that specific purpose and not just use them as a byproduct of processing them into food. However, I am going to save a bucket of these so that my wife can use them as a natural dye or to process them into black walnut ink. Let me know if you guys would be interested in seeing stuff like that too.
At this point, you may be thinking, man, this all is a lot of work and I just don't know if I have the time for it right now. And you're also thinking, oh, but I'd really love to experience the joy of getting to cook and bake with black walnut. Well, if that is the case, then you should check out my friends at Hammons because they have black walnuts that you can buy. Their walnuts are sourced from people like you and me that are gathering black walnuts from the wild. You can check out their store online and use my code FERRL to get 10% off your entire order. They are seriously, they're an incredible American business. I'm a huge supporter of their work and I'm just so happy to Hammons that they are bringing this wild food to many more people. I think it is an amazing thing.
Alrighty, so we've just done a ton of work and this next part is vital to make sure that all of it does not go to waste. What we need to do is we need to get our nuts drying to cure them ASAP. The process of curing is where the nuts on the inside are going to lose a lot of their moisture content. They're going to start to dry and they're going to shrink back away from the inner shell wall. We could crack all these right now, but then separating them from the shells would be really, really difficult because they'll kind of stick to the inner wall because they're really expanded against it. I and many other people also think that curing really, really improves the flavor. So this is not something that you want to skip.
Right after I get all the nuts cleaned, I'm going to lay them in a place where they get really good airflow. I'll often introduce a fan to accelerate the initial drying process. You don't absolutely need a fan. The important thing is that you don't stack them too deep. A single layer of them is ideal, maybe two. And at their place in an area that gets really good airflow, you wouldn't want to keep them in the closed container that we used at the beginning or in a humid environment. I'll usually leave them like that for about a day before I transfer them to another kind of container.
If you have the space for this, this method is incredible. I'm going to use hooks right here to hang my black walnuts for the curing process. These seafood bags right here are inexpensive and they are perfect for this. Make sure that you get ones like this that have a loop up here so that you can hang them. Here are all of mine hanging up in the shed right now. When you get all these up here, I also think that they just look really, really aesthetically pleasing. And if you don't have a space like this, again, the important thing is to just make sure to keep them in a situation where they have good airflow and a nice open container that has low humidity. And be aware that if you're trying to keep them outside, squirrels will definitely try to steal your nuts from you if you leave them out in the open for too long.
After they've cured for about three to six weeks or so, I'll transfer them to a longer term storage solution like a five gallon bucket or a gunning sack and I'll keep them inside. Now our nuts have dried, they have cured, so you and I are ready to be able to crack them and then separate the nut meat from the shells, which can also be quite tedious if you don't know a couple little known tricks that I'm going to show you in this video right here. It's the perfect follow up to this one and I hope to see you there. This nutritious and delicious wild food year round. That's actually pretty heavy.