Black Walnuts grow wild up and down the east coast and Midwest. Black walnuts are prized for their delicious nuts and valuable wood. In the Midwest black walnuts are big industry, every fall commercial processors shell over 1 million pounds of black walnuts for ice cream alone.
Here in the northeast our black walnuts start dropping in late September through the end of October. Like most nut crops around here they make a great wildlife food source(unfortunately there are no large-scale processors in the Northeast). If you are like most people, you might get annoying by the mess the hulls make and the constant clunking against your lawn mower blade.
Black walnuts are a great natural food source, but they require a lot of work before you can finally eat them, which is the main reason they never get harvested! If you are like me and decide you want to give black walnuts a try here are the basics steps from harvest to eating.
First step is picking the fallen black walnuts. Wait until the nuts fall to the ground, like most nut crops, ripe nuts fall off the trees. Some people do this anyway to avoid damaged lawn mower blades. Black walnut hulls are green when they fall off the tree, but they turn black the longer they sit on the ground. Nuts with black hulls are fine to eat but they will stain your hands and clothing so be careful.
The pigment of black walnut has been used as a traditional dye by Native Americans. The hulls also make a great natural dewormed for your farm animals.
Your next step is in remove the hulls. They make fancy de-hullers to do thus but at this point we are still DIY’ing it. We typically dump the black walnuts on the driveway and drive over them a few times with the car. This flattens the hulls and loosens the nut from the hull. Surprisingly very few nuts crack even after you drive over them, yes black walnut are a tough nut to crack. The greenest hulls don’t always give way and release the shell that freely. If this happens you can wait a few more days until the hulls soften up. My experience has been the blacker the hulls the easier the nut is to remove from the hull.
After I drive over the nuts I separate the nuts and hulls. This is where things get messy. Expect the hulls to be black and mussy and to stain your hands to some extent, even with gloves. We dehull the nuts and move the intact shells to another section of the driveway. You can also put them in a bucket, wheelbarrow, or something similar. After all the hulls are removed you can rinse off the shells to remove any black pigment. Clean shells can be set aside to dry for a few days.
Your next step is to dry the in shell walnuts dry. This can be done by putting the nuts on a elevated screen in the sun for 3-5 days. You can put hardware cloth or similar screen material on cinderblocks. Putting the nuts on the screen allow the air to dry all sides of the nuts at once. Elevating the nuts isn’t 100% necessary as we typically allow the nuts to dry on the driveway right where we rinsed them off. To accommodate for the air circulation, we simply roll the nuts with our shoes or a rake once a day. Nuts are adequately dry when the nut meat is brittle.
Now that your black walnuts are dry, they can be stored in the shell in your freezer for about a year. Shelled nuts can be stored in the freezer for about 2 years.
Your last step is actually cracking the shell of the black walnut. Black walnuts may be the toughest shell to crack, so tough that a regular nutcracker has no chance. Black walnut nut crackers are valuable tools but if you are just getting into black walnuts and don’t want to invest in one you don’t have to. A simple vise will crack black walnuts with no problem, it will be slower than using a dedicated black walnut cracker but it will get the job done. Put the black walnut in the vise long ways against the closing vise. Covering the nut with a dish towel or wash cloth will help avoid flying shells and nuts. Place a tray under your vise to collect the shells and nuts as they crack.
Another “tool” might be mans first tool, the rock! Set your black walnut on a rock and hit another rock into both. Again it might to beneficial to use a towel to keep the shells and nuts from going flying! And if you have outgrown those primitive options there is always specialized crackers like this one specifically for black walnuts.