The Easiest And Best Way To Shell Pecans

hey there welcome back so i thought i would show you what i've got going on today i uh transition lenses so i promised the podcast listeners that i would post a picture on social media of my handy-dandy little pecan cracker that i use because bragging on it and if you do follow me on instagram or facebook under edible gardens i think under it's on instagram it's edifying gardens and then on facebook it's edifying gardens but i showed a picture of my pecans earlier a couple like last year i showed pictures of the pecans when they were growing and we had a good healthy debate on how you pronounce pecans it's not pecan pecans if you're in texas anyway but on the podcast i talked about foraging for pecans so we have pecan trees and i'll post a picture up here of some of the pecan pictures that i have posted before but we have the native pecans and the native pecans are really hard they're really tiny and it's really hard to get the meat out of it i can get a whole pecan half a whole half is that right a whole half with using these but i'm not having to use my native pecans which are really hard to get into the meat is so good like the actual nut it tastes really good but it's really hard to get into now i have a sister that has a paper shell pecan tree and we've talked about this i'm not talking about 100 back hey renee and the meat of a paper shell pecan the the the nut the outside part let me show you this right here the outside part it's real easy to crack but the meat inside of it is just not as good and so there's kind of a happy medium in between those two so i was really lucky this year let me show you what i have i have a neighbor gave me this so shh now i asked her did you did these come from your pecan trees and she said no she went and picked him up at the park and that whole podcast episode i don't know if you listen to the edible gardens podcast but you should we have a lot of fun over there but we talked about all of the places where you can go forage for pecans my sister and i it's just kind of a tradition in our family we used to go with our grandparents and we would pick up pecans we had a grand parent on the other side of the family who had a pecan tree and he would always give us pecans since then i when i had my first grandchild i asked our neighbor next door who had a pecan orchard do you mind if we go pick up pecans and he was like sure go ahead take your grandson over there and it's like picking up easter eggs it's a lot of fun for them for a while they lose their their attention span i guess depending on how old they are um but uh we have a park where i live here in springtown texas this just has pecan trees all over it i know whenever my son played uh college football there was a place called the grove and it was just all countries that's where people did all their tailgating uh in athens texas where we used to live my sister and i would go to the county courthouse square where it was just planted with a whole bunch of pecan trees so there's lots of places where you can go pick up pecans not pecans pecans con even though we have pecan trees i have these pecans that are a little bit better because the meat is still good and i can tell there's about three or four different varieties in here where she picked them up they're bigger they're easier to crack the the shell is not so hard and the meat inside of them are still really good so even if you don't have pecan trees you can go pick up con hopefully i gave you some ideas where you can go pick up some pecans but on the podcast it's all audio right there's no video so it was kind of hard to explain what this thing looked like and this is what something that my granddad taught me how to use he had one this one's not his i found one later in life probably 10 years ago i found it at a first monday or a flea market or maybe at a truck stop maybe at a grocery store i'm not really sure where i found this but i was like oh that's just like what my granddad had and he taught me how to use these so i thought i'm just going to go ahead and show you how to do that because this is the best you get the only way i know of that you can really get these full size pieces without you know taking it to a professional sheller now if you don't want to do this and you don't want to shell that many pecans this many pecans or any amount of pecans you can take them here in texas where i live there are places where you can take just a bag like this they will shell them for you you know it's going to cost you something i don't know how much it is because i show them myself and this time of year it just always reminds me of my granddad trees because we would sit there and shelf cons all right i'm gonna show you how to do it so i started off on a very specific end so this end right here there's a lot of space in there and my little hands whenever i was a little girl that was something easy for me to understand so i'm gonna just cut that part off and then i graduated probably at i don't know what age i was i got a little bit older and then he let me do this end okay then now he always did the sides so the sides is the tricky part okay so i'm starting all over so you can see the whole process from beginning to end so there's the point of the pecan you can tell this point is just not as defined well i know what end that's going to be and i'll show you and you have this this pointy end right here hopefully you can see that but it's it's got a kind of a sharp point on it and then i'm going to take off the bottom end so this is the bottom end now you would think that you need to cut along that line but you don't you're going to do this line but it's a lot easier to see from the bottom end see from the bottom end you can see i kind of call that the butt of the pagoda because it looks like a little butt see that so we're going to cut along this strip because there's a membrane that goes between the two pecans if you've never shelled pecans before you may not know this but there is a membrane that goes in between those two pieces so i am going to cut along that edge right there okay so you can see here that part of the shell came off and there's that membrane in between now i got to do the other side now this is the tricky part you you can see i got a little bit of the the meat uh cut out of it and this one i didn't that just happens sometimes but i try to get as little of the meat as i possibly can and only shell so i have to do it at this angle okay so it happened again and it depends on whether you're right-handed or left-handed but and it does take a little bit of practice this is not something that you learn overnight so you take off those two outer pieces and what you have left this might have been actually my first job was to separate these two pieces but what you have left is a whole piece or a whole half and a whole half so even though i got into the meat a little bit i'm not worried about that so if you get an edge like right there that didn't get all the way clipped off you're gonna have a hard time so i just i did it without even really thinking but i just took that little piece of metal right there and i kind of turned my wrist and it just popped right off but if you don't get the pieces that are adjoining you'll you'll start to see after you do a few of these but let's see see like right there it just happened this happens to me a lot there's a piece that's still connected to that membrane on the inside i'm going to just get rid of that you want to get rid of all of this in between this is part of the shell it's not part of the nut this was there's there are some pieces that kind of go in there that will taste bitter if you eat it but this is probably not going to let go this side will and see this membrane let me just set that aside so i can show you this is the membrane that goes in between that membrane that goes in between is all dried out but it's in between these two pieces and i've seen people that shell pecans they have like a little tool that gets that membrane out from between there and with this little claw right here this little metal part if you do see something that's still in there i just kind of run it through there's nothing in there but i just kind of run it through there if it won't come out so i know it has to do with when you harvested them but you can just run this through there because i've seen people with little pecan tool kits that they have a different tool for that but i just started using this part and it works great so this was the part that i was talking about it might not let go if that membrane was still there it's kind of like a turtle in a shell let's see if that's gonna come off yeah they came off just fine see that membrane stayed in there with the shell but sometimes it'll stay with the nut again when it does that if if that membrane was in there part of the shell you just take this little tooth of the nutcracker and you just run it through there and it'll just fall right out [Music] but my granddad teresa is not with us anymore and like i said this always reminds me whenever i'm cracking pecans i always think of him i have lots of plans for all these pecans uh ponds are expensive y'all they're expensive so what's what i'm gonna do with this after i crack a lot of pecans not after i crack all these pecans this is not all going to happen in one sitting it does take a little bit of time while you're sitting there not watching a tv because your hands are busy and you need to watch what you're doing you got to be careful with these because these are like claws right so you that can that could hurt so you got to be careful with these but you want to be watching what you're doing but while i'm sitting there listening to tv while other people are watching tv i sit here and i crack pecans it just reminds me of him if he broke a piece and it wasn't a whole piece those are the ones i got to eat so the whole piece is i understood very young that those were for the pecan pies and my grandma was famous for her pecan pies this is made by the york it's called the york nutsheller and it is also called it's got two names i don't know why it's also called the texan nutsheller out of san angelo texas so if you're looking for one of these and you have pecan trees or you know where you can go pick up you gotta grab you one of these you know i think you can buy nut shelling kits that have something that looks like a chopstick tied at one end and kind of like pliers that'll crack them like that you're not gonna get whole pieces like this this is so much easier this is just too easy and for me it's a tradition um my dad used to have one of those exercising things and it did it served no purpose it didn't crack any pecans

Channel: Nannette Blair

Views: 3,314

Rating: 3.9473684 out of 5

Keywords: shelling pecans, how to shell pecans, pecan cracker, pecans, how to crack pecans, how to crack pecans easy, how to say pecan in the south, best way to shell pecans by hand, best way to shell pecans at home, best way to crack pecans, hard shell pecans, easy way to crack pecans, easy way to shell pecans, easy way to shell pecans by hand, Texas pecans, pecan cracker tool, York nut sheller, Texan Nut Sheller, texas nut sheller company, foraging for pecans, perfect pecan halves

Id: HLqzUy_sFOI

Length: 12min 48sec (768 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 23 2020