Cranberry Sauce, 2017

I usually make a canner load of cranberry sauce sometime before Thanksgiving, when berries are usually widely available in stores.  This year I missed that window, but found some at Costco in mid-December.  I brought home ten pounds; my normal batch is about 8-9 pounds of cranberries that make about 8-9 quarts of finished sauce.

As usual, there were a lot of bad berries.  I have gotten better (I think) at picking through them; this time I spent about 10 minutes per 2-pound bag sorting out the culls.

The bags were actually somewhat over-filled; although I pulled out almost 1.5 pounds, I ended up with about 9 pounds total--enough that they didn't fit in the pot initially (the picture below shows about eight pounds' worth when they were first added).  The berries rapidly compress as they start to rupture with the heat (my normal mix is 10 2/3 cups each of water and Whey Low, plus the berries; the berries pop when the water gets hot enough).  I added the remaining berries as the mixture cooked down a bit.

Here's something I forgot from previous sessions:  cranberries compress not only when first heating but after canning.  I had a note in my recipe book to leave 1/4"-1/2" headspace but observed that the sauce compresses as it cools. The Ball Blue Book recommends 1/4".  I ended up leaving about 1/2" in most of the jars, which led to this:

As you can see, they collapsed a lot.  The large ridge around the neck is about at the 1/2" mark, and the contents receded well below that.  They'll still be fine, and all the jars sealed with no problem, but they look like some of the contents leaked out during processing--which has happened, but did not happen this time.  I've never had issues with any jam-type products doing that, only ones with a lot of water in the jars (e.g., pickled things).

I go through about nine quarts per year, so one canner load is about right.  They keep for a few years; I have opened jars up to three years old that were completely fine.  As I noted previously, I used to buy bags and stash them in the freezer, to make sauce on demand whenever I wanted it--as it turned out, that usually did not work well and I ended up tossing them eventually.  Canning works much better to preserve them.

This sauce ends up being relatively low-carb compared to an alternative sweetened with sugar.  According to the Fat Secret website, raw berries have about 3.46 grams of carbs per ounce, but 1.3 grams of that is fiber--net 2.16 grams.  That means there are about 35 grams of carbs per jar from the berries (one pound), plus the carbs from the Whey Low.  For 10 2/3 cups divided by 9 quarts, the amount of Whey Low per jar is about 1 1/6 cups per jar.  That much sugar would be about 235 grams of carbs.  If Whey Low clocks in at 20% - 40% of that, it will reduce the overall carb impact of the sauce--when consumed in moderation.

Stuffing

I apologize in advance; it looks like there are strange things going on with the fonts in this post again.  The Blogger tools may or may not be fixing the issues.

There is absolutely nothing special about this recipe.  In days of yore, my mother made stuffing, aka dressing, and shoved it into the turkey before putting the bird into the oven at Thanksgiving.  I've never done that, but a few years ago I decided to try to recreate the stuffing itself, to be baked in a casserole dish along with the turkey.

Since I make my own sourdough bread routinely, I just did a Google search for sourdough stuffing recipes, finding a few from which I created this composite (the original link or links are lost).

1 lb sourdough bread

8 tbsp butter (1 stick)

2-4 stalks celery cut in half lengthwise & sliced

1 medium onion, chopped

2 tsp dry sage

1 tsp dry thyme

3 tsp dry parsley

2 1/2 c chicken broth (this works out to one Cambell's can reconstituted, but there are a lot of non-condensed options, too)


One pound of bread is half a loaf.  I have used both my basic recipe, roughly 50/50 white and whole wheat flour, and all whole wheat.  Both work fine.  I slice the bread into cubes and put it in the oven on a cookie sheet at 350 for 20 minutes, after which time it's thoroughly dried.

The bread goes into a casserole (I use an old round Pyrex casserole dish, 2.5 liters--it has to be at least that large; 2 liters would not be big enough).

I then melt the butter in a saucepan, then add the other dry ingredients (chopped celery, onion, and spices).  The chicken broth either goes in a few minutes after that or it can be added at the same time.  I continue heating the mixture until it is hot, then pour it into the casserole dish into which I've put the bread, mix it a little, and then put it in the oven. 

If it's baking with a turkey, the oven will be at 325, so it stays in for 50 minutes (half covered, half open).  It can also be baked a little higher (350) for a little shorter time (maybe 40 minutes).

That's it.  It's very savory and the flavor does seem similar to what I remember.

Bumper Crop of Black Walnuts

Last year (2016) I got no black walnuts.  North Georgia had a severe drought in the late summer and early fall; although I had some nuts on the trees in July, by the end of August they had all aborted.

This year was different.  A lot of nuts were downed in early September by Irma.  As I mentioned in September, I went ahead and cracked some of them right away to see if they were okay and they were.  Lesson learned, however:  The nuts had not cured.  I left the container of nuts shown in the Irma post out at room temperature to see what would happen, and after a week or so the nut meats molded.

I didn't go back for the rest of the Irma walnuts because (as noted previously) it was a total pain trying to remove the husks.  It probably took 30-60 seconds of hammering to get them off each nut.

The remainder of the crop started to drop in October.  In all, I probably got about 20 gallons' worth off of my two trees, and I left many more on the ground unharvested.  I just couldn't get to them all in time.

It takes me about an hour to process five gallons.  I have gotten better at it, but it's still labor intensive.  First I knocked off the hulls with a hammer. The fully ripe ones were much easier to de-husk.  I had some husk fly larvae but not many; perhaps last year's failed crop cut down on the population some. Then I swirled them in water in a bucket, using both the water stream out of the faucet and the nuts themselves to remove remaining husk.  I did about three or four rinses, ending up with what you see here.  That's about clean enough, though I have seen cleaner shells.  People pressure wash them or do many more rinsing cycles to get them cleaner.  They don't have to be works of art.

I haven't cracked these yet--that's actually the most labor-intensive step in processing--but they are ready to go.  They'll be good in the shell for a year or two.

Low-Carb Pecan Pie

This recipe is not any different from the low-carb black walnut pie I described a couple of months ago with two exceptions: most obviously, the nuts were pecans, and secondly, I made the crust with about 75% whole grain rye flour.

Although the amount of sweetener was the same, it tasted sweeter, probably because of the influence of the pecans versus black walnuts.  Pecans do seem to be somewhat sweet.

3/4 cup brown sugar Whey Low (aka Whey Low Gold)
1/2 cup Whey Low Type D
1/4 cup butter (4 tbsp)
3 eggs
1 tbsp vanilla
1 cup nuts
1/8 tsp salt

I baked it at 350 for 40 minutes, similar to the black walnut pie.  The crust fell apart above the pie filling when each slice was removed from the pie pan, but it held together reasonably well elsewhere.  The rye flavor was fine.

It's another potential dessert to add into the mix with someone who's diabetic.

Applesauce

This is something I haven't made in a few years.  Timewise it's not that much of a job, but it is an involved process.  First the apples have to be cut up, then heated, then processed, then seasoned (sugar and/or cinnamon), and finally canned.  All of this requires coordination of stove space, pots (including the washing thereof), and processes to keep everything moving smoothly with minimal bottlenecks.

Apples need to be pulped, and for that, they need to be heated.  The other thing I use the food mill for is peach butter, and when pulping those, it can be done raw.  Raw peaches are tough but doable.  Raw apples are not.  So they need to be cut up and thrown into a pot to cook a bit.  The first time I made applesauce, I tossed the whole thing into the pot, just quartering it.  Now I use an apple slicer and pitch the core.

There is some apple pulp that gets lost when sacrificing the core, but I do it this way for a few reasons:  First, getting the seeds out is a help.  They just contribute to the mess in the mill.  Second, the area around the stem is likely to be dirty and have pesticide and herbicide residue (I wash them off to some degree, but washing thoroughly in the stem area would be troublesome).  Third, the cores often have problems--apples often begin to decay in the core area before the rest of the apple suffers any loss in quality.  Using an apple slicer also makes the process pretty quick, and cuts the apples into relatively narrow pieces for heating.

As a side note, the slicer above didn't last very long.  I got it to handle big apples, which it worked well for--for the first 100 or so apples.  Then it broke, forcing me back to my other slicer that is smaller and does eight slices.

Once sliced, they go into the pots for heating.  There's no need to dunk them in a vitamin C or citric acid solution to prevent browning as I do when preparing apples for dehydrating.

The heating phase is the most difficult logistically.  The apples will break down rapidly as they heat, but initially, for 8 quarts of sauce, about 25-30 quarts of heating capacity are needed.  I put a little water in the bottom of the pots to limit sticking (the apples themselves will contribute more as they cook down), and turn the pile over frequently to heat the slices on top.

It can take a while to heat them, maybe 20 minutes, and at that point there will probably still be a few slices on top that are hard.  Trying to mill them is an exercise in frustration.  I just toss back any that are hard and let them continue to heat.

Soft slices pulp almost immediately.  The peels don't break down and have to be removed frequently while milling.

Milling enough apples for eight quarts of sauce takes a while.  Probably a half bushel, roughly 20 pounds raw or even a bit more, are needed for that amount of sauce, and much of that ends up being cores and peels, i.e., waste (unless you have rabbits, chickens, or other animals that might like the tailings).  All of the fiber is apparently in the skin; applesauce itself has almost no fiber.

 

 At any rate, I just hook the mill on top of a large pot and periodically transfer the sauce back to one of the pots--once I have one emptied of cooked slices--for seasoning.  I don't add sugar.  This batch of sauce was about 2/3 Stayman and 1/3 Goldrush, with a few Arkansas Blacks tossed in.  I added a little over two tablespoons of Ceylon cinnamon as the only seasoning.  Having the sauce in a pot facilitates heating it back up--it will have cooled during milling--before ladling it into the jars.

Once the other pot is emptied of apple slices, it has to be moved off the stove to make room for the canner.  While the canner is heating up, the jars can be prepped.  Applesauce is one thing that regular-mouth jars work well for; I have a mix of those and wide-mouth in inventory.

The remaining processing step is simply to fill the jars, leaving 1/2" headspace, and processing.  The National Center for Home Food Preserving recommends 25 minutes for hot sauce (I'm over 1000 feet in elevation), but if the sauce isn't really hot, I go 35--and I use atmospheric (non-pressurized) steam canning, as noted previously. Pickyourown.org recommends the same processing time.

That's it.  Acidifying is unnecessary; the pH of the finished sauce is about 3.5, well below the 4.6 threshold.  Three big pots--16 quart and 20 quart stock pots plus the canner--are involved, along with the mill, bowls for sauce, small pot for the lids, funnel, jar lifter, spoons, etc. Cleanup requires time and coordination just like the earlier steps. It ends up looking close to the cartoon I posted before, but it's all good in the end. Total time for all of the above was about four hours (including cleanup).

Addendum:  Here's something interesting.  I did two batches this year; the first one was Stayman and Goldrush, as noted above; the second batch was Arkansas Black, Cameo, and a few Goldrush apples.  The color of the sauce was different; it had a red blush to it.  Shown below is the second batch by itself and then in a composite that includes the first batch (already shown above).

The Glow of Fall

Fall--in terms of colorful foliage--comes relatively late to north Georgia.  The peak color usually comes around the time of October 31-November 7 or so, with good viewing another week on either side of that interval.  Weather plays a role; if it's relatively dry and not windy, with good weather in late summer to set up a nice leaf-turning season, color can persist for as much as five weeks (in varying stages).

I don't know that I've ever adequately captured the almost luminous quality some fall foliage has--the right lighting can make it almost glow.  That seems lost in pictures.  The sassafras seedling at the top of the page is nice but not quite there.

Adverse weather can trash the fall leaf-viewing season; once leaves get to a certain point wind or rain will knock them down.  About three years ago, north Georgia got a dusting of snow in early November; it might be common up north but is a rarity here.  The snow came in on a strong cold front that had high winds, as well, bringing down the curtain on leaves for the year.

The specimen hickory is small and in my back yard.  It's showing pretty good fall color most years now.  For yellow color, hickory is my favorite.  Some maples turn yellow, too--sugar maples can be yellow, or orange (or a mix); Norway maples (which do not grow commonly or well here) are also predominantly yellow.

For reds, red oaks are the most striking to me, although sourwoods (shown above with the gold tassles) and black gums also turn a nice color.  Sweet gums can be anywhere from yellow to dark purple.  I have a purple seedling I'm going to transplant soon.

So what's the point of all this?  Not much.  It's just a nice time of the year.  It's beautiful, ephemeral, and sometimes fails to reach its potential--not unlike us.

Atmospheric Steam Canning

A few years ago I picked up a non-pressurized steam canner.  It was a model that's no longer made; initially, I was primarily interested in it because it was stainless steel and held eight quarts.  My graniteware canner held seven quarts, and when filled with enough water to cover quart jars, tended to gurgle water a bit.  I had to deal with boiling water bubbling up under the lid and out.  It wasn't the most fun to contend with.

The canner I got had a temperature gauge on the lid and instructions for steam canning, so I gave it a try and it was much easier.  At the time the National Center for Home Food Preservation (NCHFP) site warned against non-pressurized (or atmospheric) steam canning, saying they had been inadequately researched.  Still, for acidic foods it seemed to have potential.  The important thing needed for acidic food processing is to get the contents of the jars to boiling (actually, somewhat less than that is okay) for a few minutes.

Atmospheric steam canning is more convenient and quicker.  Less water needs to be heated, making the process faster and the canner lighter in weight than it is when water-filled, though the weight factor isn't as important as it might seem--it does not take much water to fill the canner up when a full load of jars is being processed, since the jars displace so much water themselves.

I tried a few loads with the steam process and noticed the jars in fluid things (e.g., pickles), was boiling when I took them out of the canner.  That suggested the steam got the jars to an adequate temperature. I processed most things a few extra minutes when steaming.  The canner also can be used for boiling water processing--though some steam canners cannot, since the lid fits on the body below the level of the top of the jars.

I then ran across a peer-reviewed study:  Paola Whitmore, et al., "Home processing of acid foods in atmospheric steam and boiling water canners." Food Production Trends 2015; 35(3):150-160. I had seen another article previously.  Essentially, Whitmore and colleagues put thermocouples in canners and in jars to measure temps with boiling water and steam processes.  The temperatures reached during processing both ways were essentially the same.  They included temperature graphs that show how slowly things cool off--which you have probably noticed if you have canned--and indicated that steam with equivalent processing times to boiling-water canning was fine.  The NCHFP now agrees, citing the Whitmore article.

Canning is probably not an area where a  lot of grant-funded research is being done these days, so this might be the only article on the subject for a while.  This process can't be used for low-acid foods, since they need pressurized steam (temps of 240 F) to kill botulism spores.  However, steam for acidic foods at normal pressure lightens the load a little when processing.

Tallow Cornbread

I've posted my recipe before (adapted from another one online) that I use for cornbread.  I've adapted it for use with rye flour, too.  As the recipe notes, some sort of fat is called for.  I use 3 tablespoons, plus whatever I use to grease the dish (which is maybe a half teaspoon more).

I usually use sunflower oil as the fat, plus lard to grease the dish.  I used to use Crisco--I got a huge vat of it that sat in my refrigerator for a couple of years before I went through it all.  However, I've grown more skeptical of the product, figuring that at a minimum it offers no advantages over animal fats. I switched to lard for greasing duty. I was initially using hydrogenated lard from the store, which is pretty tasteless.  I recently got some from leaf lard from Fatworks that has more of a flavor to it, and I will try adding it to my next batch.  In the meantime, it's doing duty greasing pie pans (including the one I baked my recent pumpkin pie in) and other baking dishes.

Before I got the leaf lard, I bought some tallow.  I had always wondered about tallow and wanted to see how it would behave and taste.  I was inspired by Jill Winger at theprairiehomestead.com, who renders tallow from her cattle and uses it for a few things--culinary and otherwise.

My initial plan was just to use it for greasing instead of vegetable shortening, and it is not really the best for that, although it will work at some level.  The texture is not as smooth as lard; it's clumpy (which can be ameliorated by heating it a bit). It also has a beefy smell and taste that's noticeable (at least I noticed it; when I baked pies I could usually detect the tallow flavor, though others who ate slices never commented).

Then I used it on some cornbread.  After a pause of a few months I'm making that again; I have some Blue Clarage to grind up but in the meantime I trekked to the only store I know of (Whole Foods) that sells organic cornmeal.  In most cases I'm not too concerned with non-organic foods, but in the case of grain, I don't really want to eat Roundup-ready varieties to the extent that I can avoid them...they're obviously in commercial corn products like grits, but avoiding when possible is relatively painless so I do so--as another example, before the Crisco I used to use Canola oil but have now ditched that, too.

At any rate...I made a batch of cornbread and could taste the tallow (otherwise, sunflower oil went into the mix).  In this instance it was pretty good, more so than when traces of tallow essence showed up in a blueberry pie.  Cornbread picks up the flavor of whatever fat is used, assuming there is one; in many cases, bacon grease is used which definitely impacts the taste of the finished product.  So I decided to give tallow as the fat in the dough a try.

It worked reasonably well.  Tallow cornbread might sound unappetizing but it isn't.  The tallow is definitely there and definitely flavors the bread much more so than the sunflower oil, which has a very subtle flavor that gets lost in the finished product.  I'm looking forward to trying lard with it and may get some that's not as neutral as the leaf lard for special applications in the future.

More on Processing Pumpkins

A couple of years ago I wrote about processing pumpkins.  My method wasn't very sophisticated.  I haven't tried putting the whole thing in the oven yet, but I have improved my approach to cutting the beasts. I think it was Erica Strauss, of nwedible.com, who gave me the idea.  I made an initial cut, then used a rubber mallet to finish the job.

First I removed the stem area, Jack-o'-lantern style.  Then I started the knife and hit the knife at the top of the blade/base of the handle.  It took a few taps to get most of the cut done on one side; I just rotated it as I went.  No seeds fell out as it was almost inverted.  I did the same on the other side, then split it open and processed as usual--face-down in a baking dish with some water, 45 minutes at 450.




I think the only way easier would be the whole-bake approach.  That would simplify cutting it, but then there'd be a hot steaming mess with seeds still inside.  It is comparatively easy to pull those out when the flesh is still hard.

This process was a success.  It took about 15 min to bisect and  clean each pumpkin rather than 20 minutes (or more) just to cut it.  It was a lot less tiring and dangerous, too.

More on Persimmons

Last month I commented on native persimmons.  The flavor was pretty good, although the harvest season was short-circuited by the hurricane that blew through: it knocked a lot of immature persimmons down.  Although still relatively early by persimmon standards, my friend's trees are done for the year.

There's another tree I noticed in the woods near where I run.  It dropped a couple during the hurricane, but otherwise was holding onto its few fruits.  Yesterday (10/12) a couple more were on the ground, so I picked them up.

The flavor was comparable to the ones from the other tree, but what I noticed was that they were much larger.  Also, the pulp was flecked with brown, which is common (the other tree didn't have it, or at least have it in many fruits).

I'm not sure I'm enough of a persimmon connoisseur to tell the difference between cultivars, but I've never had an improved persimmon, just the two wild ones.  Cultivars have other advantages.  Most are northern in origin.  Often northern persimmons, when fertilized, produce fruit but not large seeds down south--according to the University of Kentucky CES.   This would be nice; the seeds of persimmons are large and numerous (but otherwise not very objectionable).

I've ordered native seedlings.  Hopefully I don't get a fistful of male trees...

Lifespan of Canned Food

The standard published rule of thumb is that home-canned goods are fine for a year.  I've noted elsewhere that some of the things I have canned have been good for far longer.  However, I haven't yet had anything age more than about four years before using.

Home-canned foods aren't good for extreme long-term storage, as this picture shows.  This looked like fruit, probably peaches but there's no way to tell.  There's also no telling how long ago it had been canned (the Atlas mason jar was, as far as my quick online search can determine, probably made before 1964--of course, jars can be used repeatedly over a long period of time).

I found this collection in the basement of a house I was looking at a few years ago.

If you look closely, you can see some mold at the top of some of the jars.  I would've tossed these, and I'm sure whoever bought the house did...though it might have been interesting to do a nutritional analysis on non-moldy ones.

In the house I eventually bought, there were some 1994-vintage dilly beans.  They looked about the same and I tossed them intact into the dumpster.  The jars weren't anything different from what could be bought today--Kerr or Bell--as far as I could tell.

So when you can it yourself, it might not last all that long.  However, in most cases you'll be canning things you use, and even if you can more than a year's supply at once, if you diligently rotate you'll never be opening jars more than a few years old.

What about commercially canned products? There are websites suggesting that the storage life of undamaged and un-bulged cans can be essentially indefinite.  One even mentions a study from the Journal of Food Science in 1983 that examined several cans of food up to about 100 years old (though the authors apparently didn't go as far as tasting the century-old oysters or even the 40-year-old corn).  From personal experience I have seen a couple of things:  I decided to open a can of corn that was about 10 years past its use-by date one time to see how it would be; it wasn't as good as new but wasn't bad.  And I have also seen cans go bad; I have had a couple of bulged cans myself over the years and my mother occasionally had a can of beans or another vegetable rupture and spew.  Can perforation or failure to seal is another possibility.  One time a long-forgotten can of some pasta dish dessicated over some time period, becoming like a freeze-dried meal...except it wasn't.  I didn't open the can but tossed the whole thing.  Acidic foods are allegedly more likely to damage the structural integrity of the can.

Canning is only one of the ways to extend the life of food.  Dry-canning is another (putting already low- or no-moisture foods in an oxygen-free environment), as is dehydrating (with or without subsequent dry canning).  But canning (in the conventional 'wet' sense) has a role, too, even if it doesn't last forever.

Low-Carb Black Walnut Pie

Although I have mentioned black walnuts before (more than once), I'm not sure I've ever commented on the flavor.  It's good and quite unlike English walnuts, which are more commonly available commercially.  Black walnuts are strong and it's probably accurate to call it an acquired taste.  My first exposure wasn't very positive, but I have grown to like them a lot.

Black walnut pie is a great way to eat them, and I have a few other recipes that use black wanuts, too.  The basic recipe is something like this:

1 cup sugar (white, brown, or a mix)
1 cup corn syrup or sorghum
1 tsp vanilla
3 eggs, beaten
2 tbsp butter, melted
1 c nuts (all black or can mix 50/50 black/English)
1/8 tsp salt

Mix, pour into a pie shell, bake 10 minutes at 400, then at 350 for another 40 minutes.

That's pretty high in carbs, mostly because of the sweeteners.  Here's an alternate (I developed it for someone who's diabetic):

3/4 cup brown sugar Whey Low (aka Whey Low Gold)
1/2 cup Whey Low Type D
1/4 cup butter (4 tbsp)
3 eggs
1 tbsp vanilla
1 cup nuts
1/8 tsp salt

Bake at 350 for 30-40 minutes.

For the shell (rolled or swaged):

1 cup whole wheat flour (could also use rye)
1/4 cup oil, butter, or lard
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
1/4 cup water (if rolling crust out; otherwise not needed)

I don't know what the carb content per slice is.  For the crust, the total net carbs are 76 grams (72 grams with rye); this is less than 10 grams per slice. The black walnuts have about 4 net grams of carbs per cup.  The Whey Low adds some carbs.  The carb impact is substantially lower than with sugar. The Type D is somewhat lower than the regular granulated Whey Low according to this analysis on the Whey Low site.  One cup of sugar has about 200 grams of carbs; 1.25 cups would have 250 grams--meaning the per-slice carbs from the sugar would be 31.25 grams (if sugar was used).  If the Whey Low impact is overall 18% of that, it would be pretty low per slice.

As noted previously, 100% whole wheat does not hold together well when rolling out a crust.  One solution is to add some white flour, but that a little to the carb content (88 grams per cup for white versus 76 for whole wheat).  Another approach is to swage the crust.  Swaging is probably not the best term, but basically it's just a process of dumping the flour mixed with the fat and other ingredients into the plate as clumpy powder, then forming it to the bottom and sides.  Maybe cold sintering would be a better term.  At any rate, it works, albeit at the cost of making a fairly friable and fragile crust.

So that's what I did.  I used sunflower oil and mixed it well, then formed the crust to the plate.  After that, I mixed the filling ingredients, adding the nuts last, and dumped them into the pie shell.

While this does not make for an award winning crust, it works decently well.  I put the pie in the oven and the result looked pretty typical for a black walnut pie, albeit somewhat compressed (the volume of sweeteners was somewhat lower than normal, so as it cooled it compressed a bit--still, it was decent and didn't look at all bad--the picture below is fresh out of the oven).

 

The flavor was fine.  Since I didn't bake a more-traditional pie at the same time, I couldn't do a side-by-side comparison but it was very tasty and not recognizably different.  My friend's blood glucose readings after eating a slice were comparable to what he sees otherwise, meaning it didn't cause a spike.

Nut pies have better low-carb potential because the main ingredient of the filling is essentially carb-free, unlike fruit pies.  It may be worth investigating if \dessert options that have a lower carb load are desirable.

Irma Walnuts

I think about 1/3 of my black walnut crop was knocked down during Irma.  A friend who has several black walnut trees had a similar loss rate.  I figured they wouldn't be ripe yet, but decided to process a few just to check.  As mentioned previously, I hammer off the husks, wash them to get them as clean as reasonably possible, then crack them.  These early nuts had no husk fly larvae in them; there either won't be any this year or the eggs haven't hatched yet (it's possible the cycle is temporarily broken at my place; last summer the whole crop dropped prematurely because of the drought--no husks, no new generation).

The husks from the first few have been extremely hard to remove.  It might be because they aren't quite ripe.  Hopefully later it will be better.  Pretty much everyone says you should let the nuts dry for a while after husking, but this time I cracked them within a couple of days because I wanted to see how good they were.

I used my Master Nut Cracker (also available from 855sheller and maybe a few other places) to do the cracking.  It went pretty well this time. 

The nuts I cracked were from my good tree--the one that I think is an improved cultivar.  As you can see, it has big nuts and they yield a lot of nutmeat.  The cracker easily breaks them up without damaging the nut meats much, so I can get out big pieces.

 

The container shown has maybe three nuts in it.  I only cracked five total as a test.  I'm going to husk the other early ones at this point and look forward to the normal harvest when they start dropping in another couple of weeks.