2024-10-09

Foraging Walnuts

Over the past few days I've been collecting newly fallen walnuts while out on my dog walks and processing them each day. It's time consuming and doesn't yield much in the way of useable nut meat. Here's what I had going into today's processing. Three nuts previously harvested and processed in previous days. Four nuts deshelled and ready to process this morning. Six more ready to go tomorrow. Four nuts take about 40 minutes pick apart into usable nut meat. It's a relaxing morning activity on the porch.

Six green nut fruits sit on a table next to two plastic containers. One plastic container has smaller dark brown nuts and the other plastic container has a small amount of walnuts

This is what the four nuts look like when they've been hit with a hammer a couple times to crack the hard inner shell.

A pile of broken, dark brown nut shells with inner nut meat revealed

2 plastic containers sitting on wood slats. The left container holds the broken nut shells with nut meat. The right is empty.

Breaking open the fleshy outer casing to pull out the inner nut shell. I'll let the inner nuts dry for a day or two before I process them further.

A gross looking mashy fruit is broken open to reveal a yellow interior and a dark brown inner nut

And the final result, 1/3 cup of nut meat from seven nuts. I'll probably harvest another few handfuls and will end up with a cup of nutmeat when I'm done. Not much but enough for a few baked goods.

The final result of the process is a small 1/3 measuring cup full of small walnut pieces ready to be used in a recipe.

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