Husking/Hulling Black Walnuts - Efficient and Fast

we're in the second week of October here in central New York State and right now it's absolutely peak black walnut season so maybe you live in a northern state where there are black walnuts raining down like crazy I keep my eyes peeled whatever we're driving and periodically there'll be a tree right along the road where there's just carpets of nuts friend of mine Andy and I were able to collect ten gallons 15 gallons per minute of walnuts the other day in the husk the challenge though is once you have all those nuts how do you clean them and get them to a place where you can actually dry them and store them it's one of the most flavorful nuts on earth but until you get the husk off they're not really great for storage so I'm going to show you the steps that we use it's super mucky and grimy and wonderful and very quick so let's talk about it so we found that works really nicely as we start with a metal garbage can and I want to say a side note here I made a video about this two years ago and I rewatched it recently and it took so long before I started explaining the process that I'm doing this again so hopefully I get to the point in a timely manner we start with a metal garbage can ideally it doesn't have holes if it has a little leak it's not a big deal into it we dump 5 to 10 ish gallons worth of black walnuts in husk they don't have to all be perfectly green they can have maggots and worms in between the husk and the shell that doesn't mean it's rotten and bad the chickens will love this later on we'll talk about that but so we dump these in this is a few hundred nuts [Music] and what we've found works incredibly well is we'll cover this with rainwater and we use a sturdy drill in this case it's a half-inch chuck drill you might be able to find one used I bought this new for $70 it's useful in other ways and this is a paddle whip or a paint mixing tool five four five gallon bucket vats this cost nine dollars from our local hardware store this works incredibly well if you get a sturdy one of these but don't have a big drill you can use a file and file this down so it fits a smaller drill so we'll pause here and get this covered this can be with rainwater pond water does not have to be clean water you can see we actually use the same water over and over again for this process of agitating and cleaning the husk off does not have to be clean water will cover it with some murky water you want enough water you'll get a feel as you do it but you want enough water to cover them that once you start agitating the nuts can move around pretty freely in there so now we'll do the agitation part which will abrade the nuts against each other and use each other's shape to knock the husk loose so my friend Robbie here has been helping tremendously and he is the drill master on this event so he'll get going with that part [Music] so once it feels like this is something you'll get a feel for as you do it we have a sense now that you run this drill for about 3 minutes 5 minutes on full bore you keep adding water if needed so that it moves around and then nuts hit each other over and over and over again and they knock the husk off of one another what we'll do now is start scooping off manageable amounts it's a mix of nuts and husk and we use you could use rainwater for this we're not trying to get them perfectly clean at this stage we're just trying to get a lot of the muck away so that we can see what we're dealing with what you can see is that so some of them need another go so we'll set these aside and you could have run the drill longer or you could also just pinch that off sometimes but some of them that need a whole other round we throw off to the side and we'll give them another go the ones that are relatively clean of the husk are now ready for the next phase which is where they'll go into a crate this can be whatever sort of device you want you can get the idea of what this is and it will go into a tub of water and we'll fill this up a bit with rainwater so we'll continue that process we'll dump out the bucket by bucket from the tub they'll be about three hundred two to three hundred nuts in this group and by filling this with water we'll look for the nuts that are clearly floating nuts that float on top of the water are almost certainly duds they're empty or there's some sort of problem you can skim those off and either send them to your chickens throw them out into the woods for the squirrels to enjoy or put into the compost the people in the past have been concerned Oh what about all the walnut muck alone it'd kill all your plants we find if we put it into a compost system bulk it out with chips and give it time we've not had any problems with juglone fishing and authorities will take this and skim it off and give it to our chickens mixed with sawdust in about a month or so anyway we'll continue on with that process and then we'll then come to here and agitate once more [Music] [Laughter] that helps do a little more cleaning now we'll just do one last blast of water on these now we're not trying to sell these or have some very fancy cosmetic situation if most of the husk is off and a lot of the discoloration is off you should be good for storage at this point so now we'll get them onto racks so they've been agitated with the whisk and the drill they've been agitated again in a little change of water washed off it could be with rainwater if that's what you've got or a garden hose or the jet stream is great and now they're on racks ideally in the Sun it's a little cloudy today but it will mark and we turn them a few times throughout the day keep a little live for squirrels and the light although it's nice to share a bunch with them so always plan to collect more than you'd enjoy eating yourself so we'll let these dry in the Sun for the whole day and then we have these simple boxes made out of scrap lumber and half-inch hardware cloth but you could use door screens or window screens set on bricks you can improvise with what you've got we've made these where we can dry stack them in the garage up on bricks and have a fan facing down through them if it's rainy or overnight and that helps dry them out this was this represents about maybe three to four hours of processing so it's doable to get a huge amount without without a lot of time so hopefully this is useful for you probably thank you so much for your help thank you and there you go thanks for watching

Channel: EdibleAcres

Views: 127,918

Rating: 4.8331943 out of 5

Keywords: black walnut, walnut, husking, hulling, husking walnut, hulling walnut, husking black walnut, hulling black walnut, quick walnut process, processing walnuts, black walnut processing

Id: N4zdqdvLaG4

Length: 8min 34sec (514 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 08 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/edibleacres]

This method got us 2-3 thousand nuts cleaned and ready for drying in a handful of hours of focused work. I hope folks find it useful!

[u/sagegreenpaint78]

I have a large walnut tree and really need a method to make it worth it! Thanks!

[u/bubba_lexi]

I'll never need this info but you conveyed it very well, great vid.

[u/JennaveX]

I just watched this video earlier tonight in YouTube! :) Hubby and I tried following your method last year on some walnuts that we harvested from our yard. The challenge we faced tho was how to crack the shell after drying. We found it extremely challenging and tedious for so little nut. Is it possible we didn't let them dry/cure long enough? What is your favourite walnut opening technique??

[u/whereismysideoffun]

I am setting up an off grid homestead, so don't have any extra power or tons of available water. For walnuts, I dry all the walnuts on a tarp. I use billboards that I buy from the area billboard company. They are very durable and are black on one side. I dry them black side up. They are good to store then. I crack em with a vice, which can easily go through everything in one go.

[u/TrevoniusJones]

I've been doing something almost identical to this video for several years now, using a mortar mixer I bought at Harbor Freight in a 1/2" drill. In 2017 I ended up with about 350 pounds of unshelled walnuts (4 banana boxes and 4 orange boxes full).
I made a frame from 2 x 4s that's 2' x 2' square, chicken wire and a wire refrigerator shelf on the bottom, with 1' tall legs. I just dump the slurry (reminds me of lumpy pig manure) on the stand and hose them off like this in a grassy area. After I do 2 sets, I put them all back in the garbage can for a final round. It hasn't damaged the grass, and ground up this fine the husks decompose real fast. I dry them in another 2' x 2' stand made of 2 x 4s that sits upright and has chicken wire on either side of the 2 x 4s. The bottom has short legs to keep the stand upright. I put a 20" box fan on one side, newspapers underneath to catch the drips, and let the fan run on medium speed for a couple days. I use a black walnut nutcracker from Lehman's that's about $50, have had it for 14 years. All the pressure is against itself and I don't have to bolt it down to anything to get the pressure. It's compact enough that I can put it in an empty box that new half pint jars came in. The box catches most of the flying shards and provides a reservoir to put more nuts close at hand. I crack them on a wooden coffee table while watching the idiot box in the evening, so it's a productive time while relaxing (or a relaxing time while productive).

[u/yer_muther]

I love black walnuts. The trees at my folks place grow the best nuts.

As a kid we used to put the still in the hull nuts on the driveway and dad would drive over them with the car. Then we'd glove up and get messy.

[u/edibleacres]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTgvgqFfEvA - Follow up video showing the Master Nut Cracker (masternutcracker.com) tool we use to crack black walnuts, hickory and other super hard to process nuts...

[u/bbqueue710]

Amazing! Thanks for sharing. Do you ever save any of the murky water for dying fabrics? I know people use walnut to make dyes and I see it stains your hands pretty easily.

How long do you dry the walnuts in the sun or with a fan? Do you store the nuts in their shell until you need to crack some to eat? I imagine a cool dark ventilated place if you store the nuts in shell?