How to crack black walnuts

We have a custom built cracker that can crack 600 lbs per hour.

I was just talking to a guy who was remembering his father jacking up his truck a little off the ground and shoveling the nuts under the tire as it turned. Sounds dangerous and interesting. He claimed it worked quite well and was common practice in Michigan in the 1940s.

My Papaw taught me to use a bench vise to start the cracking, then to gently tap with a hammer on a clean concrete surface. This method got the best results in getting out all the nut meats. Lot of good memories.

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mattc,

you sure he wasn't just getting the hulls off? I don't see how that would help to crack them open.

my dad always left the walnuts in the driveway to be driven over to de-hull (is that a word).

and hammer and something concrete to crack them. you learn the knack after a few dozen. I much prefer to crack open hickory nuts, so much easier to pick out. I might have to tell my dad about the boiling bit to try. me, I just let the squirrels have the ones on my tree. cracked enough and de=hulled enough as a kid.

I'm the son of a physician in rural NE Ohio. He had a lot of farmers as patients. It was not unusual for a farmer to stop by our house and drop off produce as a friendly gesture.

One such farmer dripped-off a gunny sack full of black walnuts every year. We tried everything to open the blasted things. One thing's for sure, there's a lot more wood in them than nut meat. We would hammer on them for a few months, then eventually throw the ones we didn't get open into the fireplace. There must be a moral to my story, but I can't imagine what it might be.

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Boil them for about 1 hr, then use any good nutcracker or a hammer and railroad rail and nut picks. Still not easy, but much easier than dry.
John

There's not much info out there on how to crack them, and believe me I've looked. Crackers for black walnuts can run upwards of $30, and they are all crack-one-at-a-time affairs. Any cracking method is tedious.

The trick is to put just enough pressure on the shell to crack it just enough to hopefully leave the inside meat intact. It's not easy. When hammering or squeezing the nut in a vice, you're supposed to position it where the pressure is going to be on the pointy ends of the shell. From what I've read, it seems a vise or vise-like device is the way to go.

Before trying to crack them -- whether with a vice or a hammer -- it's important to let the shells dry for about two months. This allows the meat inside the shell to dry out and shrink so as to make it much easier to extract.
I've gotten several opinions on drying times, but 4-6 weeks seems to be the
most frequent rule (although I heard from one person who drys them for about a year.)

I've also heard and read that you should soak them in hot water for about a half hour before cracking them, and I suppose this also loosens up the meat within the shell. Howevet, I've also heard that this step is unnecessary.

Havesting black walnuts is a whole lot of work any way you look at it. My friend and I decided to harvest nuts from a couple of trees on his property this year. It was a learning experience. First of all, there was only one huller at a co-op within about 50 miles of us, and they would pay ten cents per pound for hulled nuts. The wait for getting the nuts machine hulled -- that is, removing the green hull from the shell -- took a couple or three hours this particular day because everybody had a bumper crop this year. We had a had a choice of keeping the hulled nuts at a cost of two cents per hulled pound or selling them to the co-op for ten cents per hulled pound. We chose the latter as did everybody else we saw that day at the co-op. (We spent about 2.5 hours in a long line of pickup trucks to get the nuts hulled.)

After talking with the folks at the co-op, we found out that the real money in black walnuts comes from grinding the shells into granular powders for use in things like facial cleansers. This was a surpirse to me considering that I know that black walnut nutmeats are quite expensive.

This year was a learning experience for us. The first thing we learned is that you must have the nuts hulled (green covering removed) very shortly after they've been gathered because the nutmeats start rotting pretty quickly once the hulls start turning brown.

Anyway, after considerable research, I've found that there really is no simple way to crack black walnuts. I love eating them, and I'm still using a hammer with a brick as a platform.