Black Walnuts

It's almost black walnut time in north Georgia.  I've had a few nuts dropping for a while, probably due to drought, but the main drop starts about now and lasts for a few weeks.  The ones that have dropped already probably are not mature.  The ones that dropped in July definitely were not ready.

Nuts are harvested when they hit the ground.  They're covered in a spicy-scented thick green husk, which is removed to reveal the nut itself.  English walnuts, which are the more familiar variety, also have husks but they split apart somewhat easier.

The nuts themselves are pretty tough.  A normal little hand-held nutcracker probably won't work well (though I haven't tried to use one myself).  Forget about the decorative ones that star in Christmas plays.  Once the husk is gone, what's left looks sort of like a normal walnut, except that the ridges are sharper.  The photo is of some of the nuts I harvested last year--you can see that some have mold on them; I'm not sure why, but I cracked a few of those and they were all bad.

The first nuts I processed I used a hammer on; I just carefully whacked at them using the driveway as a backstop.  It worked ok, but was very inefficient.  I damaged a lot of the nutmeat and probably spent upwards of 20 minutes per nut.  That was just a demonstration project to assess the viability of the nuts.  I soon decided that I did want to harvest my nuts and went searching for a better nutcracker.

I soon found one:

It's available at:  http://www.masternutcracker.com/.  The website is not the most user-friendly, but there's a form that can be printed out and you can e-mail in advance with any questions you may have. There is at least one reseller I know of, and may be others:  http://855sheller.com/.  The tool does a great job and can crack the nuts with ease (it works on other tough nuts, like hickory).  There do appear to be some knockoffs available for sale from a lot of outlets; they do not seem to function as well:  Master vs. copy.  I've ordered from the Master site twice and have had very good experiences.

855 Sheller also sells other crackers, including one that can be used with a drill to process nuts quickly--they have posted videos on their YouTube site showing it in action.  If I had more trees, I would probably have to do something other than crack them one at a time, but I don't get a very big harvest.  It's more of a novelty for me at present.  Maybe someday the trees will be producing more, and I have just planted a new improved cultivar tree (Thomas Myers) that is advertised to yield big nuts with thin shells (I think one of my existing trees is something like this, or another big variety; the nuts run 20 to the pound).

A much easier option is just to buy them; the little packages at the grocery store are expensive but chopped black walnuts can be had from Amazon and other places relatively cheaply thanks to the business model of Hammon's, a Missouri company that buys nuts from small-scale harvesters who pick the wild nuts up off the ground.  There do not appear to be very many commercial producers.  The trees themselves are more often grown for their timber value, which can be substantial.


 

Beans (and Dealing with Old Beans)

I love beans. I have grown Kentucky Wonder pole beans and bush pinto and cranberry beans (I have also planted cranberry beans from the store; as far as I know there are no hybrids [ditto for store-bought pintos]).  This post is about cooking with pintos and cranberry beans.  I like cranberry beans more--they're somewhat sweeter--but both are good. I'm not a real fan of kidney beans, black beans, or others--at least when i cook them myself.  I do have some Anasazi beans; they turn out okay.

Until very recently, my procedure was invariably this:  soak one pound of beans for at least six hours.  Before soaking, the beans have to be sorted through fairly carefully.  There are usually a number of bad beans in the bag, and there will often be some small dirt clods and rocks.  The beans themselves grow in pods above ground level (unlike peanuts), but modern harvesting methods make it pretty easy for foreign objects to get into the finished product (however, in a one-pound tranche of dry beans, you probably will not find more than a couple of rocks). After soaking, some sites recommend draining then rinsing, to limit gas byproducts of bean consumption.  Other sites say that doesn't help much.  Even if it helps some, it probably won't eliminate the problem: Beano and similar products can help with that.

After soaking, set the level of the water at just barely above the soaked beans; add two diced onions, a few cloves of garlic (4-6 usually, sometimes 10 depending on size), and bacon (4 ounces); then cook covered on low heat for about 90 minutes. When I lived in Denver at higher altitude, they had to be cooked for about two hours.  At that point, check for tenderness; if the beans are done, cook on slightly higher heat with the lid off for another 10-20 minutes or so--this will cause the beans to cook out some excess water (if there is any, which there usually is), and allow them to skin over a little.  The final result is usually really good.  I've been cooking them this way for a very long time.


The last few pots, I've switched to a pressure cooker. A friend in Denver suggested I do that long ago, but I never did until recently.  I stuck with the tried and true method above.  For pressure cooking, the procedures are similar, but the cooking time is less. I adjust the water level to just below the soaked beans (the onions release a lot of water while cooking and I don't cook them down like I do with the open pot). I upped the bacon to six ounces because the pressure cooker manual said a teaspoon of cooking oil should be added to cut down on the amount of foaming during cooking.  I figured the extra bacon would add enough fat.  So far, I do not seem to have any foaming issues, but I don't put much into the vessel (one pound of beans into an eight-quart cooker).  The manual says six minutes at pressure, but I cook them for 12 and the results are good.

It takes me about a half hour to cut everything up and add it to the pot--I'm not that fast--and then pressure cooking time is about 45 minutes overall: it takes a while to heat up to pressure, then still longer for the pressure to drop after the 12 minutes.  That's still substantially faster than cooking in a non-pressurized pot, and heats the house up less (a plus in summer).

Why'd I get a pressure cooker?  Trouble with old pintos.  I bought a 10-pound bag of pinto beans, and had a few that didn't get cooked for a couple of years.  They looked fairly old soon after I got them and looked worse when I finally tried cooking the last few pounds (old pintos turn dark brown).

Utah State University has guidelines on softening old beans.  Cooking the normal way didn't work.  Even after two hours, they didn't soften and tasted pretty gross.  The first attempt was just about the worst pot of beans I've ever made.

I then tried one of the suggestions--adding baking soda to the cooking water.  Didn't work.  Another suggestion was to freeze the beans after cooking.  That helped a little one time, but failed another.  Maybe freezing after soaking, before cooking might help.  I didn't try that.  Finally, I decided to get a pressure cooker.  I cooked the first load for 15 minutes and it worked--at least it made them tender.  The taste wasn't 100%, but they were ok.

Why go through so much trouble? After all, they cost less than a dollar a pound.  But sooner or later, I'll have more old beans to deal with.  So I was motivated to find a way to make them work.  As a byproduct, I have now implemented a way to cook even fresh(er) beans that's quicker and somewhat easier.

Above I mentioned that they usually turn out well.  That's not quite right.  Usually, they turn out heavenly.  It's probably a little weird to be so euphoric about beans, but for whatever reason, they are just about my favorite dish.  One pound when cooked will last me for several meals.  They're usually the main course.  I add a little bread on the side sometimes, or cornbread.  I know I don't add enough grains to get full protein out of the beans, but that's okay.  If I have to in the future, I can do that.

Many thanks to the person in Denver decades ago who schooled me in how to do these; she brought them to a party; I loved them; and she explained how she did them.  I've been making them ever since.