processing black walnuts

[retire2$]

What procedure (from collecting the hulls to extracting the meat) has worked for you in processing black walnuts? I was given a 5 gallon bucket of black walnuts (still in the hull) and want to try and process them to make a cake that will hopefully taste as good as my grandmother used to make. Yes, I will make the cake from scratch (no store bought cake mixes in my grandmothers house). Also, does anyone have any scratch cake receipes. Thanks in advance for any and all replies.

[NCLee]

http://www.walterreeves.com/food_gar...l?cat=4&id=220
HARVEST
Black Walnut trees begin producing nuts when they are about 10 years old but the best nut production begins when trees are 30 years old. Good nut crops occur in approximately two out of five years. The nut is contained in a thin, green, leathery skin (the husk). The husk-covered nuts begin falling in late September. Pick up nuts regularly to avoid insect damage to the kernels. Remove husks immediately after harvest. This can be done by hand if you are sure to wear rubber gloves and old clothes to avoid stains. If you have a quantity of nuts, another method is to fill a burlap sack one quarter full and run over it two or three times with an automobile. The tire will loosen the husks so they are easy to peel off. Years ago, when small Southern farms grew corn to feed their animals, a cast iron corn sheller was reputed to be the very best Black Walnut de-husker available.

After removing husks, rinse nuts in water. Discard nuts that float; nuts that sink have full kernels and are worth your time to crack. A small hammer and a brick are the only tools some people use although long-handled adjustable pump pliers are said to do a good job as well.

http://www.extension.umn.edu/yardand...404blkwal.html

Corn sheller - http://www.pleasanthillgrain.com/cor...tationary.aspx

Should be able to find a used one for less money.

Lee

[Stephen in SOKY]

Here's a wonderful cracker for black walnuts: http://www.harborfreight.com/cpi/cta...temnumber=3552

[uncle Will in In.]

Since this is just like grandma did it, you'll need a claw hammer and an old fashioned flat iron. Grandma always wore a heavy apron. She sat on an old wooden kitchen chair with the flat iron upside down held between her skinny little legs. She took the walnuts and gave them a whack or two with the claw hammer on the iron. Now she layed the hammer down and picked up the big finnishing nail she had in the apron pocket. She started digging out the goodies from the shells. Sometimes the shell required another whack with the hammer. This was always a dreary late fall afternoon job. 5 gallon of nuts should keep you busy for hours. Don't get in a rush to hull them because they need to cure for a while or the nuts will make your tounge sore when you eat them. This is a great project too work on in front of the old wood cook stove. You can throw the shells in the stove as you go, and keep the chill out of the kitchen till supper time.
My grandma was born in 1864. <>UNK

[GoldenCityMuse]

Good Description UNK.

[uncle Will in In.]

Hey there Retire25 <> you ready to make a walnut chocolate cake that gets kudos at the family reunion?? Just ba second until this Great Grandma sitting here reads me the lowdown on doing it.

One Layer chocolate Cake
1 cup of flower
1/4 cup of cocoa
1/4 teaspoon of soda
1/4 cup of oleo
1 egg
1 cup of sugar
1 teaspoon of baking powder
1/4 teaspoon of salt
1/2 teaspoon of vanilla
3/4 cup of milk
------------------------

Cream the sugar and oleo, and one egg..
Mix dry ingreds together (flower cocoa baking powder soda salt) mix all the above together now.
Stir in the milk and vanilla with dry ingredients.
will work in a greased 9x9 pan. Bake at 350 for 30 minutes. --- OR --- Microwave 7 minutes.--- Your microwave may vary. Check it with a piece of spaggetti till it comes out dry.
FROSTING
The nuts go in the frosting.
2 1/2 cups of powdered sugar
1/4 cup of cocoa powder
1/3 cup of butter
1/2 teaspoon of vanilla
1 1/2 tablespoons of milk
beat with mixer
Now stir in about 1/4 cup of nut meats (Use your best judgement here)
------------------------
Spread on cool cake
After you have the cake iced, sprinkle on a big hand full of milk chocolate bits. rub them down into the frosting. Now take some of your nicest walnut meats and lay then generosly on top the frosting.

--------------------
You will find that some people hate the taste of black walnuts believe it or not. For them English walnuts will make their taste buds love you.
Save me a piece <>UNK

[Wis Bang]

Mom used to borrow one of dad's fender dollys from his body & fender tools & smacked 'em w/ a ballpeen hammer.

Definitely wear rubber gloves to remove the husks. Otherwise it takes months to get the green stains off your fingers...

[Beeman]

Wear gloves when handling. Throw walnuts in the driveway and drive over them to get the husks off. It takes an incredible nut cracker to crack them. My friend's Mom uses an arbor press with an adapter he made to hold the nut on it's end for cracking.

[Oldcountryboy]

Originally Posted by Stephen in SOKY

Here's a wonderful cracker for black walnuts: http://www.harborfreight.com/cpi/cta...temnumber=3552

I wonder if just a regular bench vise would work? Also, wonder if there is a certain way of placing the walnut in the vise and crack it open to where the goodies will come out easy.

May have to do some experimenting. I've got a million walnuts picked up already, just so I can mow.

[ronbre]

make a box wide enough to drive a tire over..put the nuts in the box and drive the tire over the walnuts to crack them..several times..

use gloves to remove the hulls..your hand will turn brown

[Kstornado11]

We have walnuts EVERYWHERE in our yard, we live in the middle of a walnut grove! It can be dangerous walking outside when it's windy,as the walnuts are HUGE this year! Someone said

Don't get in a rush to hull them because they need to cure for a while or the nuts will make your tounge sore when you eat them

-- how do you know it's time to hull them? Mine are pretty soggy from all the rain/floods, and the hulls just slip off when you walk on them (it's next to impossible to take a step in the yard w/out sliding on them!).

I am thinking banana nut bread
http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Extreme...NB/Detail.aspx

and/or some kind of walnut cookies? This cool weather sure has me in the baking mood!

[Oldcountryboy]

I now have 5 barrels full of walnuts picked up. Most of them came from my yard and my aunts yard. We have walnut trees on the property line which divides her lawn and my front lawn. Will be taking them to a nearby feedstore where they hull them out and pay you per pound of hulled walnuts. I didn't sell any last year but the year before I got .13 cents a pound. Hopefully they have gone up some. But still yet .13 cents isn't too bad. It takes me about an hour to pick up a couple of hundred pounds of green walnuts if they are thick on the ground. After hulled should be about a hundred pounds that I would get paid for. That would come out to about $13.00 a hour for picking walnuts.

[chrissum]

Dpnt forget safety goggles/glasses!

[wvstuck]

There is no easy way to get the goodies out of black walnuts... Unlike English Walnuts, the Black Walnut is rather dense in the hull (inside) you just have to crack them and do your best at getting all the little pieces out of the inside... God truly made the best things in life, the hardest to get. I have swore for years I am going to cut down all of the Black Walnut trees and plant English Walnut trees in their place> I just never followed through.

[cowcreekgeeks]

Originally Posted by Kstornado11

We have walnuts EVERYWHERE in our yard, we live in the middle of a walnut grove! It can be dangerous walking outside when it's windy,as the walnuts are HUGE this year! Someone said

-- how do you know it's time to hull them? Mine are pretty soggy from all the rain/floods, and the hulls just slip off when you walk on them (it's next to impossible to take a step in the yard w/out sliding on them!).

We used to pick them up hulls and all, throw them in a burlap sack and toss them in the cellar for a while. When the hulls turned black we'd hull them and crack them. If your hulls are slipping off I'd say they're ready.

[soulsurvivor]

Originally Posted by cowcreekgeeks

We used to pick them up hulls and all, throw them in a burlap sack and toss them in the cellar for a while. When the hulls turned black we'd hull them and crack them. If your hulls are slipping off I'd say they're ready.

We did the same except we used an enclosed outdoor garage that had a dirt floor and spread them all over that to dry. We also used the old-time heavy metal hair pins to dig out the stubborn kernals.

[Ezekiel's Garde]

Daddy always stuck 'em up on the chicken house roof until the green husks were sufficiently brown and slimy. He had a couple of 2x4 nailed near the bottom, so they wouldn't roll off onto our heads. I think this took a week or so in nice fall weather.

Then, we'd take them down, and they'd pretty much come out of their husks with little to no effort. We'd let them dry out in a single layer on the driveway for a sunny afternoon or so. After that, he took 'em down into the basement to work on at his leisure.

When he's in super-cracking mode during the winter, he sticks a bag of them in the freezer for a couple of hours. This works for hickory nuts, too, BTW. It seems to help the meat come out better.

We use them for maple-walnut divinity, oatmeal cookies, and banana bread.

[sunflower-n-ks]

Ummmm...... black walnuts are soooo good. But so hard to get to. LOL I and my siblings spent many hours when we were kids using an old flat iron and hammer and square nails to get the meat out of those hard shelled little things. But the rewards of the baked goodies payed off in the end.

I also have lots of the trees and the nuts are extra large this year. I am going to try to get some of them shelled to use.

Around here, shelled walnuts sell very high. For someone with the will power and time to do it, it could bring in some extra funds for a project.

[o&itw]

There are basically two ways to remove the husk (if you don't a machine)
One, as stated above, is to dump the nuts in your (preferably gravel) driveway and after a couple of days the tires rolling over them will remove the husks.

If you ever do it on a more yearly basis and don't really want a buch of wallnut husks in your driveway, you can cut two wooden circles out of heavy wood or plywood, and make a cylinder out of half inch hardware cloth using the circles for the ends. Use small fence staples or a huge radiator clamp to hold the wires to the edge, and cut a door in the side. You end up with something that looks like a wire sided keg, or a minnow trap. You put carriage bolts in the middle of each end... or if my handy a bolt in one end and a "crank" in the the other, and mount on two upright boards or stakes so you can turn it like a lottery barrel. The walnuts are put in it and left for a couple of days to dry, and then it can me turned to remove all the husks.

Like has been said, the juice in the husk will stain your hands, and can't be cleaned... it has to wear off. Some people turn them to get the worst off, and then wait a few days and turn them more to get the finer powder off.

However you get the husks off, stratify the the nuts into a bucket or wash-tub and add water. The floaters are no good. If one is collecting walnuts from the same trees consistantly....they will occasionally find a tree that has
watery and green colored nut meats that are no good. Such trees normally have these unusuable nuts year after year... so skip picking up under them.

As far as cracking and getting the nuts out themselves, expect to need patience and smashed finger medication.

[mammabooh]

Thanks so much for starting this thread...I was just going to start one asking the same thing!