Big, hard nuts... I'd like to smash 'em!
October 28, 2011 5:53 PM   Subscribe

Our black walnut tree delivered us a great bounty this year. We've husked and are drying about 2 bushels. However...

I've heard these nuts are exceptionally difficult to shell. I've looked into nutcrackers designed for black walnuts and they seem prohibitively expensive (some in the hundred dollar plus range). I'm wondering is a 1/2 ton arbor press (~30 dollars at Harbor Freight) would do the job. My question: has anybody every heard of using a press to crack these nuts. And if that is not practical, why not? What other methods besides the messy and dangerous steel hammer method do you know to get these nuts cracked--without smashing the meat into an unusable pulp?
posted by Chrischris to Food & Drink (17 answers total) 2 users marked this as a favorite
 
The squirrels seem to be doing it by dropping them onto concrete or rolling them off the roof, but that's impractical for non-squirrels; I've heard of people using a workbench vice.
posted by holgate at 5:59 PM on October 28, 2011


Best answer: A vise is how I've done it., but I can see a press working. Even after they're cracked it's still a lot of work to get the nut meat free of the shell's intricate interior shape.
posted by jon1270 at 6:04 PM on October 28, 2011


Best answer: Surely a common Vice-Grip, properly used, can shatter any mere nut.
posted by chairface at 6:07 PM on October 28, 2011


One of my grandfathers told a story about trying to crack a black walnut with a hammer and the hammer bouncing back and hitting him in the forehead. They eventually resorted to what a lot of folks do -- putting them in the driveway and running them over with the car*. Trouble is, they stain. I've never tried it, but I always thought that putting a sheet of plywood over the nuts and THEN running over them would work better, since it would distribute the weight.

A press or a vise would probably work, but you'd have to do one at a time. The car method at least allows for volume.

*I live in a town with lots and lots of black walnut trees. The crows sit atop the stoplight poles and drop the nuts into traffic. It works well for them, though retrieving them is always a bit hairy.
posted by mudpuppie at 6:10 PM on October 28, 2011 [2 favorites]


Cook's illustrated had a product testing and like the lever style nut cracker.

http://www.cooksillustrated.com/equipment/overview.asp?docid=32288

I just got back from North Carolina where my friend has a large number of pecan and black walnut trees - and he uses a form of lever style nut cracker that worked very well.
posted by helmutdog at 6:11 PM on October 28, 2011


Further to my post above - my friend had the Reed's Rocket nut cracker.
posted by helmutdog at 6:13 PM on October 28, 2011 [1 favorite]


My grandfather used to spend every winter in his workshop with a few bushel baskets of black walnuts and a hammer and anvil. They're tough nuts to crack, but certainly not made of steel or anything. They just take time.
posted by jferg at 6:35 PM on October 28, 2011


Best answer: I'd use a 10" Vise-Grip.

They have about a 2" jaw capacity, which isn't all that great, but I had pretty good success with eight-inchers.

I left a bag of 'em on my back porch overnight accidentally overnight once, and there was only a big pile of small fragments of shell left there by six next morning; I really don't think a drop from any height within the troposphere could crack the black walnuts around here, by the way.
posted by jamjam at 6:47 PM on October 28, 2011


The shells are in demand for use as a polishing agent in rock tumblers, I've heard.
posted by jamjam at 6:58 PM on October 28, 2011


Would something like this work?
posted by dizziest at 7:05 PM on October 28, 2011


Best answer: I've heard about wedge-type attachments for a small arbor press to crack them, although that may have been a custom one-off deal.

The bench vise is the way my dad taught me to do it.

for removing the husks, my uncle uses an antique corn sheller.
posted by ArgentCorvid at 7:10 PM on October 28, 2011


Best answer: I've used both a mechanical arbor press and a large quick-action vise. Apply just enough force (along the line of the seam) to break the shell into almost-two pieces. Hand force will pop it open. One half will usually be harvest-able, the other will usually require putting back in the press (rotated 90 degrees) and little more force to reveal the other hemisphere of flesh.
posted by introp at 7:30 PM on October 28, 2011 [1 favorite]


You need a walnut cracking board. You drill a hole on the board just big enough for the nuts to sit in and then you drive them through it with a hammer. The nut goes out, the husk stays behind. I tried to find an example for you, but they tend to be handmade things. My grandparents had one that was about 30 years old.
posted by katyggls at 8:23 PM on October 28, 2011


Best answer: >has anybody every heard of using a press to crack these nuts?

Yes. I have my grandmother's black walnut cracker, mounted on a metal plate by my
grandfather, that is nothing more than an arbor press.
posted by the Real Dan at 10:22 PM on October 28, 2011


Response by poster: Thanks for all the answers, folks. So far, I've used both the vice-grip and bench vise method to crack a few experimental nuts. Both worked well, but were a little slow (my bench vice worked best but it is not a quick-action. The vice grip worked quick but tended to shatter the shell) and messy. I'm off to Harbor Freight today to grab an arbor press (which will do dual duty as a bearing press and sheet metal break in the workshop as well as a nut cracker). If I remember, I'll report back on its efficacy.

Thanks again for all the great advice.

BTW, the hole in a board + hammer is how I dehusked the nuts. Slow, but thorough and very clean if you do it over a 5 gal. bucket. Wear 2 layers of gloves if you can (my nails wore a hole in the latex gloves I was wearing, so I'll be sporting some heavy duty brown staining on the fingers for a few weeks...)

posted by Chrischris at 3:46 AM on October 29, 2011


I've found that the best way to dehusk them is this:
  • a few days to a couple weeks before you plan on dehusking, dump the fruit into some pans or pails; the shallower the better, but take what you can get
  • spray the fruit with a hose to wet them, but not so much the bottom ones sit in much water cover the trays/pails with plastic and leave them
  • the husks will start to disintegrate and rot; when they're nearly falling off...
  • take your buckets outside and dump all the fruit on the ground, somewhere you don't care about stains. Usually that's right under your nearest black walnut tree or in a dirt patch in your back yard.
  • just roll the husks off with your boot. Literally step on them lightly and roll the nut back and forth under your foot once or twice. The husks will fall off and leave a damp nut that you can toss in a bucket. You can do a five-gallon pail of fruits in just a few minutes.
This is basically imitating how the old timers here harvest them in the wild in bumper-crop years when there are so many fruits on the ground that the animals can't keep up. You wait until the husks start to rot from the fall rails, roll them off, and collect the nuts.
posted by introp at 9:26 AM on October 29, 2011


The one time I had them (gift from a friend) I used the hammer method, on the concrete out on the patio. Those shells are hard! Nothing like your common grocery-store walnut, maybe even worse than Macadamia nuts.
posted by Rash at 7:46 AM on October 30, 2011


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