Transcription
Thousands of years before almond milk, before oat milk, and before soy milk, we humans made this. Right here, this is Hickory milk. Particularly the indigenous people of Central and Eastern North America, where hickory trees are native. The Cherokee call this drink konachi. Today, I'm going to show you how you can make it too.
But why would you want to? And why did Native Americans go through all the trouble of making it? Because, especially without modern tools, it can be relatively laborious. There are three main reasons.
First, Hickory milk is extremely nourishing and healthy. Hickory nuts contain over 650 calories per 100g, which is over double what you get from wheat. So, this was a life-saving food source. Hickory nuts are also filled with essential vitamins and minerals. There are too many of them to name. I'm just going to put all of them over here and highlight them for you. Many of these will be difficult to get from other sources in a typical Western diet.
Okay, all this sounds great so far, but the big problem with hickory nuts is that they're extremely difficult to separate the nut meat from the shells. So, the second reason is that Hickory milk gets around that problem. Because we don't worry about separating them from each other, we just crush everything up all together and powder it to make this milk. That Hickory milk powder was also very easy to pack for storage, for transport, and trade.
Finally, and here's the big one, Hickory milk is one of the most delicious drinks on the planet. In my opinion, Hickory milk is the perfect nourishing holiday drink. It puts hot hot chocolate to shame. America, this right here is your drink. So, let's learn how to make it.
And to do that, we're going to need hickory nuts. But foraging for hickory nuts does have a few pitfalls. There are three big ones, and I'm going to show you how to avoid each of them. And remember, you don't need to worry about memorizing all the details in this video because I've put them all in a downloadable guide just for you.
To start off, let's make sure that we're all on the same page. I wanted to find what a hickory actually is. Hickories are trees that are in the same plant family that gives us walnut. Their group is called Juglandaceae. There are over a dozen different species of hickory, and they are found primarily across Central and Eastern North America. All of them have what's called pinnately compound leaves, another name for that is feather compound, and they have various numbers of leaflets on the leaves.
Hickory trees produce hickory nuts, which is of course the particular interest of this video. And to us humans, hickory nuts are initially encased in a green husk that eventually dries and turns to a brown color. With most species, the husk will naturally split as they dry, but there are a few exceptions to that that we'll explore. Also, for our uses, all the hickory species are not made equal in terms of the nuts that they produce. We'll cover that more in a bit as well.
For now, we need to know where to look for them, and that is the first big pitfall that you could run into. You may think hickory nuts come from hickory trees. Trees grow in the woods, so let's go into the woods to find them. And you'd almost be right. Going to the woods is a really good place to start, but don't go all the way in the woods, especially in a situation like a closed canopy forest where hickory trees are going to be competing for sunlight and space and area, and they're generally not going to have enough energy to fruit vigorously. Plus, even if they kind of do, they're going to be really difficult to gather from the cluttered forest floor. I either look for hickory nut trees on the edges of forests, in more open woodlands, or along creek sides. But another great place for everyone is honestly just around your neighborhood, around parks, or things like that. I've knocked on many doors, and most people are very excited at the notion that I'll be picking up all the nuts in their lawn.
Another element, though, that will have a big negative impact on hickory nut productivity is squirrels. Yes, believe it or not, just squirrels can have a huge impact on them. So, if you have the proper license, there are some tricks that you can do to get a different kind of wild food and a lot more hickory nuts as well.
But what kind of hickory nuts should we be looking for? In my basket right here, I have an assortment of several different species of hickory nuts. And the second pitfall is knowing which of these that you want to gather. Like we talked about before, there are over a dozen different species of hickories, but some of them you don't really want to gather for eating, like bitternut hickory (Carya cordiformis). As you can imagine from the name, bitternut. And really, there are three main ones that you want to be looking for for gathering to make hickory nut milk, and they're all pretty easy to recognize.
The first one is shagbark hickory (Carya ovata), and this one is also thankfully one of the most common species in North America. You can probably guess the easiest way to recognize them: it's the bark. I mean, just look at it. It is incredibly distinctive and very, very shaggy, for how it gets its name. The one trick with this one is that there is another species called shellbark hickory that does also have somewhat shaggy bark that I personally don't really use for hickory milk. The way to distinguish them is that shagbark has compound leaves with mostly five leaflets, and shellbark has leaves with mostly seven leaflets. Also, I've got some nuts of shellbark right here, and a big characteristic of them is that they are ridiculously huge. That's where it gets its other common name, king nut hickory. This tree produces the largest hickory nuts in the entire world. Holding them here side by side, you can see how much larger both the husks and the shells are of shellbark hickory compared to shagbark hickory. I definitely do eat shellbark nuts, and I think that you should too, but just not for milk. I'll show you what I do with them a little bit later.
The second big one is pignut hickory (Carya glabra). The range of this one goes much further south than shagbark does. Now, with pignut hickory, I need to address something about the name. Some of you may be surprised that I'm even listing pignut hickory because you know that to be a hickory with very bitter nuts. The reason for that is that way back in the day, botanists actually mixed up the name of pignut hickory with the actual bitternut hickory tree. Bitternut hickory. Many communities still refer to the modern pignut hickory just as hickory or common hickory, which is totally fine. So, to clear things up, when I say pignut hickory, I mean Carya glabra, which does not have bitter nuts. The one that actually has bitter nuts, most often called bitternut hickory these days, is Carya cordiformis. Both of these, pignut and bitternut, do not have very flaky bark like shagbark does, but they do have bark with intersecting ridges. In addition, both pignut and bitternut have husks that really remain attached to the nut and the shell; they don't naturally split open all that much. So, because we wouldn't want to have bitternut ending up with our batch, we need to know how to distinguish them. And if you know the right details, it's very easy. Again, pignut hickory usually has five leaflets per leaf, and bitternut hickory usually has nine per leaf. So that's a really easy way. But they're also easy to distinguish by the nuts themselves. Pignut hickory has a completely flat surface at the top, whereas bitternut has four distinct ridges running along the top. I use that detail to distinguish them all the time. But even if you were to break the husks off, bitternut shells have a little point at the top, and pignut don't. So, no matter how you find them, they're very easy to distinguish.
And the third and final species is black hickory (Carya texana). Now, most of what I know from this one comes from what I've learned in Sam's book, Incredible Wild Edibles, as it doesn't really grow in my range. Black hickory is found from East Texas up to Missouri. And if you're watching from that area, then following Sam's video, make hickory milk with black hickory and then let all of us know how well that it turns out. I myself am very curious about it. I've heard it's pretty good, but I want to hear from you.
Oh, and I've got one more nut that I want to cover for people from my region of the Southeast that you want to look out for to not use. I'm talking about these right here, which come from a species called mockernut hickory (Carya tomentosa), which is one of the most abundant in our area of the Southeast. But they unfortunately don't produce very good nuts for making hickory milk. You'll find them and think, "Wow, these are really, really large. This is going to be amazing. I'm going to be able to make a ton of hickory milk with them," only to get to cracking them and find out that most of this right here is shell, and there isn't a whole lot of nut meat on the inside. For recognizing them, first, mockernut hickories are often found growing in very dry, sandy conditions, and the leaflets, the leaf stems, and the twigs are all very densely haired. That's where it gets the species name tomentosa, with a hammer. These things are going to be very, very difficult to crack. However, if you use a goody getter, a tool that I'll show you in a second, you can actually crack them relatively easily. The problem is, the further steps that you'll go through into making hickory nut milk are not going to work that well with the really, really thick shells from this one. So, it's one that I personally don't use myself.
And just really quick, I'm going to cover two lookalikes that I think you could potentially be confused by. The first one is black walnut. We learned about that earlier. It's a distant cousin to the hickories; they're in the same family. With black walnut, they also have a green husk or hull that surrounds their nuts, but they don't split in the way that hickory husks do; they remain unbroken. The only exception to that being a few species like pignut hickory, which have husks that don't really split open. Even then, though, black walnuts are a lot larger and they're way more spherical versus pignuts, which is more ovoid and it kind of tapers at one end.
The second lookalike is buckeye, or sometimes called horse chestnut. These are trees and bushes in the genus Aesculus. Their nuts can look a bit more similar to hickory, but they're going to be kind of different. The big difference is that with buckeye husks, they're going to house multiple chestnut-like nuts per husk, versus hickory, which have just one hard-shelled nut per husk.
But when should we be looking for hickory nuts if we want to find them? Hickory nuts generally mature and fall to the ground, usually between September and sometimes into November, depending on where you're looking for them. They're going to be earlier in the north and a little bit longer into the season in the south. And don't forget that you can find the timing window for dozens of other wild food and herbs in my interactive forager's calendar.
All right, now we have found the right kind of trees, we found them in the right area, and there are a bunch of hickory nuts all over the ground. But this next pitfall may be the biggest one of all. Do not invest a lot of time gathering all those hickory nuts, filling up a basket, without testing them first. There's nothing worse than coming home to a bag full of nuts only to find out when you get to cracking them that they're all, all bad. So, when I'm out in the field gathering my hickory nuts, I'll use a rock if there's one close by, or I'll bring a hammer with me, and I will crack open a handful of them to make sure that a decent amount of them are good.
But after that, after you've found that most of them are good, here's a few more tips to throw out the bad ones before they even make it into your bucket. First, in this video, we've talked a lot about the husks that surround the nut. And with some species where they split open, like shagbark, if you find it tremendously difficult to actually break those off of the nut, just toss that, get rid of it. That is a bad nut that fell early before it was able to fully mature. Remember that some of those, like pignut, they don't actually split open, so that doesn't mean that that one is bad.
Second, look out for nuts with a little round hole in them. That is an exit hole indicating that a hickory weevil has already eaten what you are after, and it has also pooped in the nuts, which is not something that I personally would want to consume.
And finally, look for nuts that are particularly discolored or that feel extremely light in the hand. Those are most likely nuts from last year, and they're probably really, really bad. Beyond bad at this point in time. For some of my best spots, I'll actually go out to them before the season even begins to rake away all the nuts from last year. This makes it so, so much easier to gather only the good ones when they do start falling.
No matter what, though, you're probably going to end up with at least a few bad nuts in your batch. So, with this next trick, you can root out most of those without even needing to crack them open. What we're going to do is we're going to fill up a container with water, and then we're going to toss a few of the hickory nuts in. Hopefully, most of those will sink, and a few of them will float. Generally speaking, the good nuts sink, and the bad ones float. But be sure to actually test the ones that are floating because if you gather them at a time where they've already begun to dry, the good ones can float too.
With pignut, you want to make sure that you actually dehusk them before you do the float test because the husk will make most of them float, even if they're good or bad. Pignut hickory is one of the most abundant ones that I find in my area. So, here's what I do to dehusk a lot of them very quickly. I don't try to take them and crack them and remove all of them one by one as I'm going along. Instead, what I do is I'll take them and I'll put all of them immediately into a container. Then I'll take those and I'll throw them into a bucket. I'll cover it with a lid and I'll shake it all up really, really vigorously. I'll take the contents of the bucket and I'll dump all of that immediately into the water to float them, which will also naturally float the husks along with it. That is a really, really efficient way.
But there's another benefit to floating. In addition to separating the good nuts from the bad ones, naturally doing the float test is going to give a nice light clean to the shells. And remember, the shells are going to end up in our milk too, so we want them to be clean, free of dirt, debris, sand, things like that.
Once we've gotten all the good ones separated, we can get them drying and curing in an area with good airflow. I've found that my hickory nuts last for about a year or so if I store them in the shell inside in a room temperature environment. And we need to crack them at least in half first to inspect the nut on the inside to make sure that we don't have a bad one before throwing them in with all the others. The one type of nut that won't be caught by the float test would be a rancid hickory nut, and that is not something that you want to eat. Having them in the batch will completely ruin your hickory nut milk. Good nut meat fills the inner shell and is a nice even beige color on the inside, and it's also free of blemishes. Rancid nuts are usually discolored; they're a really dark yellow, or sometimes they'll have some blue blemishes in there. And if they're really advanced, they'll start to have mold, and that'll be very, very obvious. Another thing you want to look out for is exceptionally shriveled up nut meat. Those ones aren't necessarily bad, but for me, I usually just toss them aside. The float test usually catches all of those anyway, so you shouldn't encounter too many of them.
When I'm cracking them, I break them up into smaller pieces than just in half, and I find this much easier to do with my grandpa's goody getter right here. They have this small nut ram attachment that works beautifully for hickory nuts. It also makes getting out whole halves from some species like shagbark hickory much easier to do. I'll usually have a bowl set aside for the whole pieces and another one for the ones that are harder to get out that are destined for nut milk. The other one that I'll use it for is shellbark hickory, but normally with the normal size nut ram, shellbark is the only species of hickory where I actually spend the time getting out and separating the whole nut pieces because they are so large. You can also use some of the wild food processing techniques that I've developed, like the water swirl method, which I use for black walnut, which will work perfectly for shellbark hickory as well.
But let's get back to talking more about nut milk. Even if you're using something like the goody getter with species like pignut, you're just not going to get very many whole pieces out. You can see right here, this is a cross-section of the inside of the nut, and you can see that between the inner shell and the nut meat, it's really kind of integrated and interlocked between each other. And if we zoom in, because the nut meat slightly enlarges towards the end right there, it's going to really lock itself in. This right here is the entire purpose of us making hickory milk. It allows us to efficiently extract the calories and the benefits of hickory nuts without needing to worry about going through all the effort of separating them. So, I'm going to take my pignut hickories right here, I'm going to crack a bunch of them, and then we're going to take them inside, and we'll get on to the next steps of processing them into hickory milk.
All right, and here are all the nuts that I've cracked. Now, the next step is to take all this all together and crush them into very tiny pieces, which is going to release the nut meat from the shells. And traditionally, this was achieved with effectively a really large mortar and pestle that was made with a hollowed-out log and a large branch. This tool was called a canon. However, for most people, building or even just acquiring a traditional canon is going to be pretty difficult. I don't even have one myself, but you can see in this video on the right, a video by Sam, demonstrating how they are used. I've used his before, and if you do get one, they do work fantastic.
But thankfully, there is a great modern alternative: mechanical blenders. I use a Vitamix for this, and it works perfectly. But don't make the mistake that I have in the past and use the plastic container that comes with it. You really want to get this one right here, the stainless steel one, instead. You can kind of see here that there's little bits of plastic that have been scraped out of the inner wall of the blender, and we already have enough microplastics in our bodies from all the things that are out there in our food, so we don't want to have any more. My stainless steel one works like a champ. It has been able to handle absolutely everything that I've thrown at it, or at least it seems that way. When I have my hearing protection on, be aware that this thing is going to get really, really loud when you're blending everything up. Let's do that right now.
Okay, so all that we're going to do is take our cracked nuts right here, and I'm going to fill up the container. All right, now we're just going to run it for about 30 seconds here. We [Music] go. I'm going to take the container and then I'm going to empty out all of that stuff into another bowl as I work through all the rest of it.
And here they are after we've done all of that blending. If you look closely, you'll see that there are definitely still larger pieces, particularly of the shell, that are still in there, which that is totally fine. We're going to take care of that in the next step. The nut meat, if we look closely, is really, really broken up thoroughly, and that is the important thing that you're really looking for.
Now, directly after blending, this right here is perfectly fine to go ahead and use to start our hickory milk, even with those large bits of the shells in there. But for me, as you can see, I make them in really, really large batches. That is more that I'm going to use in one go for making hickory milk because it's just more labor-efficient that way, right? I don't want to process them little bits here and there, you know, every single week. I want to get through all of it. And in addition, when you first gather hickory nuts, that is when they're going to be at their freshest. So, if we go ahead and process through all of this, then we can get it into a state where we can freeze it to preserve long-term and really lock in that quality.
But to preserve it, we're going to need to remove these large bits of the shells here. So, let me show you what I do for that. Okay, for this, we are going to use one of the filters in my foraging filter set. If you follow me for any amount of time, you know that I am a big fan of these things right here. They have so many incredible uses for wild food processing. The size that I'm using in particular for hickory milk is the 1/12th inch filter. The smaller ones going to be perfect for packing and preserving, but the larger pieces, as you'll see, we're going to have another use for them. So, I'm just going to take all these right here, pour them on top, then we just need to agitate it around to get all the smaller pieces to fall through.
Okay, so now here are our larger pieces, and here are all of the finer pieces. I'm going to set the larger ones off to the side for now, but don't throw those away; we aren't done with them quite yet. Here is the fine powder, and what we're going to do is we are going to pack these into little balls that we're going to freeze to be able to preserve them long-term and also to basically make our own little, uh, that kind of thing of them as little wild, um, bullion cubes. So, I'm going to start that right now. I'm just going to grab these and just like this with my fist, try to form them into a ball. Now, if you've watched videos of traditionally prepared hickory powder, you'll see them be able to pack this into a ball that doesn't break apart much easier than what I'm doing right now because the nature of pounding the hickory nuts versus just blending them is going to bring out the oils a lot more. So, what I do is I'll just press them, you know, with the utensil, or I'll press them with my hands a bit at this stage to make it a bit easier to pack all together. Perfect, there we go. Now check that out right there. Isn't that cool? What we can do is we can take this and I'm just going to put it into a bag, bag right here, and we can put that into the freezer. And now we have our ready-to-make hickory bullion cubes, just in time for the holidays, which, if you ask me, is the perfect time to make hickory nut milk. Thanksgiving, Christmas, doesn't matter, works fantastic.
All right, with all those larger pieces that we set aside, you can see if we look really closely at them that there are still really tiny, dusty bits of the nut meat that are attached to them, and we don't want to lose those. So, what I do is I'm going to take all these, I'm going to throw them into a jar with water, I'm going to shake it up, and then I'm going to use that and pour through a sieve, and that is going to be the initial liquid for making the hickory milk brew.
Now we are finally ready to make hickory milk, and really, at this point, we're at the easy part. All we need to do, we're going to take our blended nuts and we're going to throw them right into a pot. And then I'm going to take that water that we blended up earlier or mixed up earlier from the larger pieces and I'm going to filter that through. Look at all that. That is not something that we would have wanted to lose. Perfect. I add water in about a one part hickory to four parts hickory by weight, or a 1:2 by volume. That's a really good point to start out at. You'll find out that we can kind of adjust that later down the line if we need it to be a little bit stronger or a little bit weaker. I'm going to bring this liquid up to a boil initially, but then I'm going to lower it down to a simmer, and I'll stir it around occasionally. I'm going to leave it to simmer for at least 20 minutes or so. So, I'm going to get it boiling, and I'll check back with you guys once it's ready.
Okay, we can ladle a little bit of liquid off the top right there, pour that into a glass, and then you can test out the flavor. Wow, that is so amazing every single time. You can see little bits of oils that are floating on the top there, which comes out when you make hickory milk, which just adds a really nice mouthfeel to it as well. If you find it a little bit on the weak side, you can do one of two things. You can either leave it to simmer for a little bit longer so that more water will evaporate and that'll concentrate the flavor, or you can add in more hickory nut powder. Remember, it shouldn't be bitter or stringent or anything like that. If it does taste that way, you may have accidentally used bitternut hickory or gotten them mixed in with your hickory powder. Remember, in my downloadable guide, I show you how to easily recognize it and avoid it so that doesn't happen. For me, the flavor of this one is perfect right now. So, I'm going to take it off the heat and I'll meet you guys over here.
You can drink it straight out of the pot like this, but there will be tiny bits of nut meat in there, which gives it, you know, a bit of texture. But if you don't want that, then you can filter it out, and I'll show you how to do that in a second. Another thing that you'll find, depending on the species, is that it'll be a little bit more or a little bit less sweet, but it won't be profoundly sweet. So, if you want to add a little bit of sweetness, what I would recommend is the North American native sweetener of maple syrup, or maybe, maybe we could use smoked shagbark hickory bark syrup with our hickory milk. That would be perfect. I can't believe I didn't think about that before. Let me know if you guys want to see a video on how to make that syrup. It's really delicious and it's just the perfect pairing for this.
Okay, anyway, let me show you guys how I filter it to get a smoother consistency in the end. This is me in the future now. I had this little itch. There's a little bit more experimentation that I need to do with my filtering method, uh, and boy, am I glad that I did because I found something that I had always been looking for. So, originally, what I've always done is I've just used a metal sieve right here, but I'm going to show you how to also use a nut milk bag. So, if you go the metal sieve route, the only problem is that a lot of the time, the fineness of the filter isn't quite enough that it can keep out really tiny bits of the shell in there. So, what you need to do is after you filter it all through, you're going to find that you'll leave it, and it's going to settle out into three different layers, and you'll want to pour out the liquid so that you can leave all the solids on the bottom and just get the liquid out. The only problem that I found with it is sometimes you can get quite a lot of solids in there, and it's hard to get the liquid out, and also that the liquid is a little bit thin, and I wanted kind of more of a full, creamy hickory nut milk experience with it.
So, let's talk about the milk bag method. Here are the ones that I use. They're just a cotton milk bag, and they work really great, but there's a couple things you need to know. When you get everything through the bag, be warned, it's not going to go through quickly and easily. You need to be patient. Don't try to take the bag and really twist it and exert a lot of pressure on it. All that's going to do is it's going to push the really tiny pieces of the shell through, which you don't want in there. What you want to do is you want to slowly massage the bag and gently press the liquid through. Trust me, you're going to be rewarded with it in the end, at least I think so.
Here is the result of trying the experiment again. Let's see if I was able to replicate my initial results. Yes, it's perfect. Has such a full flavor, it's very creamy, has an amazing smooth finish. This is what I'm looking for with hickory milk. I have a few more tests that I'm going to do that I'm working on. So, if I find anything new, then I'll put them in the pinned comment, and they'll also be in the downloadable guide that you guys can all get. I'll explain more about why I switched the time that I grind them over there.
But wait, there's a little bit more. The thing that I love about hickory milk is that it really unlocks hickory nuts as a viable, labor-efficient staple wild food. And there are four other wild foods that I think you should know about for long-term survival, which you can learn about in this video right here. It's exactly what you're looking for, and I hope to see you there. The first one is hickory, so just watch the intro and then skip hickory, and you can learn about all the other four. See you guys.