Black Walnuts: Harvesting, Husking, Shelling, Cooking (300 lbs!!!)

hey guys Luke here at the altar boys YouTube channel and today I'm going to show you an awesome food that just falling out of the sky [Music] these little green fruit are black walnuts they are all over here in North America especially here on the East Coast and they taste magnificent they have much more flavor than the store-bought walnuts which are generally English walnuts and I'm going to show you how to gather these husk them pair them we're gonna make a whole bunch of good stuff with them every year we love cooking with our walnuts check it out these things are everywhere here at this park just tons of them this is the nut gather from weasel it's a tool for picking up nuts pinecone fruit whatever anything hard and round that you want to pick up off your lawn this will do it really easy this is the large model I'll put a link in the description where you can get one of these [Music] here we go babe just push that black walnuts they fall from the tree they can be really hard and green or they can be black and mushy and full of maggots and it really doesn't matter the nut inside is still good but the blacker and gooey are they are the more likely they are to stay in your hands you can see there's this black tar like that and it'll stain your hands it's like tobacco spit there's just kind of gross stuff but the nut inside still very much good and tasty well I've filled up about four bins full of walnuts and that's about 1/3 of the nuts that are underneath this tree when it comes to husking wallets there's a lot of different ways to do it you can stomp on them and squish them out of the husk with your foot you can run them over with the car you can rub them on concrete but I have about 100 gallons of wallets here that's a couple hundred pounds at least and I need to do it a little bit faster a little bit more efficient so I have this pretty beefy drill with a 36 inch long grout mixing bit I didn't have the bit so I bought it for about 10 bucks on amazon.com and this is a 55 gallon trash can it's pretty clean but you can use a drum or whatever it doesn't have to be food grade because you're not going to be eating anything that's touching the drum this is just to get the husks off now we're going to fill this up with water I have the wallets floating enough where they can mix about and you can see how black this water is so it'll stain everything so I'm wearing gloves and old clothes okay the longer you do it the fewer floaters you end up having and it turns the water into this thick slurry after about four or five minutes 95% of the husks have been knocked off the shells and the husks have been turned into this really fine pulp and I've got this wonderful organic spray-on tan now [Music] [Music] so I've got this half-inch hardware cloth and I just made a big pouch out of it with zip ties and I'm just pouring the walnut slurry in here and sifting out the nuts well normally I'd use a 1 inch mesh to screen out the husk bits from the nuts but I had half-inch lying around that's what I used and consequently I've got a lot more bits of husk mixed in with my nuts that I normally do I'm going to see if I can't separate the nuts from the husks using my driveway here I've got the two hoses that I've spread out to make kind of like bumper bowling here and I'm gonna pour the nuts here and see if I can't get them to roll down the driveway and the husks to stay put also that will let me spread them out and dry them which is something I need to do before I store them anyways so let's give that a go [Applause] [Applause] all right well there we go we've got all of our walnuts separated from the husks and spread out on the driveway we'll let it dry a little bit and then we'll store them that's about a hundred pounds of d husk wall that's right there I didn't get a chance to dry them thoroughly on the driveway before it started raining so I put them in the trash can brought them into the garage now I'm gonna spread them out on the floor of my garage and hopefully we can get them to dry out in the next couple days got all the walnuts spread out the box fan on it hopefully they'll dry out the next couple days a few random with a hockey stick just kind of using it here we go guys the fruits of my labors each of these bags are between 25 to 30 pounds plus I had about 12 pounds of leftovers so that puts this at about a 110 to 120 pounds of walnuts now if you buy whole raw organic walnuts at the store in shell there are about five to ten dollars a pound so this puts this between 550 to 1100 dollars worth of walnuts right here which I got for free my local park so that's kind of cool these will last a very long time if you keep them with these mesh bags in a cool dry place they'll last years and taste absolutely fabulous in the shelf once you remove them from the shell they will go rancid of comparatively quickly they'll last months if you put them in a refrigerator in the sealed bag the last weeks if you leave them out on the counter I just kind of put these in the basement storm in the crawl space and take them out and sell a few of them at a time when I want to make a batch of cookies or something now I'm going to show you guys how to shell these and how to cook with them it takes a little bit more effort to crack open a black walnut than it does in English walnut so get yourself something hard and a small hammer [Music] [Music] you take that a little bit out and then I'll open up the shelf somewhere there you go that's the meat from about ten wallets that was frustrating but it gives me another chance to show you an alternative method for cracking walnuts the normal nut crackers you see at Christmas aren't tough enough to crack a black walnut so you need a specially designed black walnut cracker well let's have a pointy end and a flat end and you put the flat end down pointy side up the advantages of using a cracker is that it tends not to pulverize the meat but it's still a lot of work these crackers really reduce the amount of time it takes to remove the meat from the shell and it greatly reduces the number of shell bits that end up mixed in with your meat all in all having a cracker makes us go about three to four times faster there's a few companies that still make these black walnut crackers and I'll put some links in the description but I got this one off of ebay it's an antique one I find the old ones work the best and they're about the same price there you go that's what the walnut meat looks like when you get it out intact that never happens when you're using a hammer well I only took a few minutes and I got a lot of walnuts cracked and I'm gonna take this ball into the kitchen and separate out the remaining meat and shells okay all right there we go got about 3/4 cups of shelled walnuts or about a pound all right let's go make some cookies out of these those black walnuts have such a unique and powerful flavor tool makes it absolutely worth all the extra work but I hope you guys enjoyed this video hope you learned something new if you want to see more great videos from the outdoor boys youtube channel including a bunch of outdoor cooking and foraging videos check out the links in the descriptions and don't forget to click Subscribe who put out new videos every Saturday morning thanks for watching if you like this video don't forget to check out the outdoor boys youtube channel where we have hundreds of videos just like that don't forget to click subscribe so you can see other great videos every Saturday morning and hit that Bell button you'll get notifications thanks for watching

Channel: Outdoor Boys

Views: 1,029,696

Keywords: walnuts, black walnuts, harvesting walnuts, husking walnuts, shelling walnuts, cracking walnuts, eating walnuts, storing walnuts, shelling black walnut, how to shell black walnuts, How to husk black walnuts, how to process black walnuts, black walnut recipes, foraging, foraging food, foraging walnuts, foraging black walnuts, survival food

Id: 635mHvNVcpg

Length: 11min 40sec (700 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 23 2019