FoodBanter.com - View Single Post

Tamzen Cannoy[_2_]

In article >,
wrote:

> Salutations, gentlefolk,
>
> Did a bit of research and found that the little green tennisballs
> falling in my front yard actually contain black walnuts.
>
> Any advice on how to seperate the edible part from the "containers'',
> and prepare them ?
>
> Second, another walnut tree a few houses down has a gypsy moth nest
> among its branches. Any advice on how this investation oughta be
> dealt with, and how to persuade the owner to deal with it ?
>
> Yours, John Desmond

Good advice on the waiting part.

We had 2 ways to clean the husks off. One was to lay the nuts down in a
single layer on our gravel driveway and drive over them repeatedly for a
couple weeks and then put all your small children to picking the nuts
out of the gravel. You then have to actually open the nuts. Very Very
Very hard nuts. Almost as bad as hickory to crack.

The other method my dad came up with after he ran out of small children
was too do small batches in a old cement mixer he had. That worked
wonderfully at getting the hulls off. He also rigged up some kind of
press to crack the nuts. This was amazingly accurate and he often got
very large whole pieces out of the nuts. No idea what this press was or
if I even ever saw it. My dad was a welder and machinist so he likely
invented his own thing.