This is the last
black walnut processing video that you will ever need to watch. For a lot of people, the
juice just isn't worth the squeeze when it comes to black walnuts. And that is a shame
because it's an abundant wild tree that produces tons of wild fruits that are incredibly
nutritious and delicious. They just are a
little bit difficult to process, but this video is going to change that. I'm gonna show you a method for cracking, but more importantly, for separating the
nut meat from the shells that is perfectly viable, whether you are
processing handfuls or hundreds. In my own learning with black walnuts, I have watched dozens
of videos on this subject. Maybe you've
experienced the same thing as me. The vast majority of
them offered very little value. What's up everybody? I'm gonna show you a
trick for cracking black walnuts. It's so quick, you
won't even know what hit you. You're just gonna take
your black walnuts right here. We got a hammer, we're gonna hit it. Dang this, it's
actually harder than I thought. I haven't really done this much before. There we go, just gonna hit it. All right, then you just
gotta pick them out like this. And there you go,
look at that, we got some. That's all there is to it. Like, comment,
subscribe, thank you all so much. Actually, you know, you
could do that last part for real. I wasn't satisfied that any of them would give me a
method that was efficient enough for what I wanted. That's why I had to come up with my own. There are three components to my process. One of them was
completely counterintuitive to me, but I could not argue
with the incredible results that it gave. And another one, I
haven't seen anyone else talk about before. It's what made me so
excited for making this video. I know the video is long,
but it's packed with information. So stick with me. I promise you, you're
not gonna get burned by this one. I also have timestamps
in case you need to go back to a particular
section to watch it again. After putting this method together, I really, I'm looking at black walnuts in a completely different way. I think this video is
going to help a lot of people build a deeper
relationship with this tree. And the thought of
that, it just makes me so happy. So with all of that, let's get started. This process begins at
the point where your walnuts have cured and
they're ready to be cracked. I'll tell you more
about everything leading up to this point a little bit later. For years, the
first thing that I would do is I would take my
walnuts directly off the curing rack and start cracking them immediately. And that was a huge mistake. This is gonna sound very strange, but I want you to first take your walnuts and put them in a
container with water to soak. You heard me right, to soak. Just trust me, you'll see why. Okay, check this thing out. So I actually got that tip
about soaking the black walnuts from the people who
make this machine right here, the Grandpa's Goody Getter Nutcracker. I wanna take a moment to
talk about cracking black walnuts for my method that I'm laying out. In theory, you don't
need a dedicated nutcracker. No matter what method that you use, you're gonna be able to
apply the rest of the process that I'm gonna highlight for you today. But if you're
serious about using black walnuts as a real viable wild food source, I highly recommend you
to invest in one like this. I've used a
hamburger before and the efficiency just can't compare
to a good lever cracker like the Goody Gitter. These machines are made
by an American small business and the craftsmanship is impeccable. But honestly, to
me, what really shines out about this company is
that they're really passionate about black walnuts. You can go on their
website and you can watch their videos and read their
blog posts and you can tell they actually care about this and that is what matters most to me. You can get $10 off your
order with my code right here, Ferrell24. You will get the best
black walnut cracker on the planet and you'll support not
one but two small businesses as I get a little bit
if you use my code as well. And that helps me to make more deep dives and wild food
explorations just like this one. So I hope that you check them out. And with that, let's get
back to talking about soaking. Here I have a batch of
them that are soaking right now. I've experimented
with the timing a little bit. It usually ends up
being around the 24 hour mark where they have soaked enough. With some of my shells
that I didn't clean well enough early on in the season,
I'll actually change the water a few times at the
beginning of the process to make sure that
the nut meat on the inside doesn't get too inky in flavor. When I was just
starting off with soaking the nuts and getting used to doing that, I would actually take one out of a batch around the 24 hour mark to test to see if it was at the right point. And I think the best way to tell you what you're really
looking for to know that they're done is to tell you about
the things that will happen if you don't soak the black walnuts. If you don't soak them,
when you go to start cracking your black walnuts,
they are going to split open in an explosive fashion. I don't even think that
that is an over exaggeration. (clattering) I would literally
have to wear safety goggles when I was cracking
them because they would splinter and get everywhere. I would also have to wear gloves because as they would break open, they would really
pinch my hands and my fingers. But what's even worse is
that the nut meat on the inside would be extremely brittle. So you're gonna end up
with much smaller fragments of both nuts and shells
that you have to deal with later on as opposed to when they're soaked and the nut meat
is pliable on the inside, you get way more complete pieces which I think is what
a lot of people are after. Okay, let's talk
about cracking a little bit. Now, before we do
this, I wanna let you know that cracking is something
that I am still learning myself. I'm not the best
at it in the whole world. And the cool thing about
what I'm showing you in this video is that the next two steps, which to me are the
really important part of the video, are gonna be able to compensate if you are also learning this, if you're getting a
bit more acclimated to it. And that's what I think is really amazing about this whole process
is that even if you're a beginner, you can still be really excited about what you're
able to get out of forging for black walnuts. But nonetheless, I'm gonna
show you a couple of quick things that you can pay
attention to that are gonna help you with the next steps of the process. Here's my setup here, got the cracker. I have a little container
to put the nuts and shells into, and here is a black walnut. So let's go ahead
and crack our first one. What I do is I place my
hand around it right here loosely, and I'm feeling for as I press down that it's expanding on all sides. Okay, now I take this one off, and I'm just gonna start to take apart the outside pieces right there. All right, and then I'm
placing this all into the container. So if you were
doing this a different way, you might want to worry
more about setting these aside as you're going through it. But as you'll see in the next step, that doesn't matter for
how we're doing things here. Just chuck them all in the pot. It'll make things faster, trust me. One thing that
I've been experimenting with is whether or not, you see, this is what I call
the flat side right here. That's the flat, and
this is what I call the top. I don't know if it's actually the top, but that's how I
think of it, flat and top. And whether or not to place it in with the top side up or the flat side up, I'm still experimenting with that. And as I learned any new things like that that aren't included in the video, I'll make sure to
put them in a pinned comment with any updates so
that you guys can check back in and see if there's anything new. Now, one cool thing with the Goody-Getter is that you can get these
nice full half pieces right here, which is really awesome. But for me, I'm
not too worried about that. I did a
double-blind placebo-controlled trial between the halves and the quarters, and they tasted just the same. What I'm worried about is the taste. I'm not worried about
getting them full like this. I'm not selling them. These are just for me. So that's all that I care about. You will lose a little bit of efficiency if you try to get
them perfect every time. So it's up to you
and your personal preference of what you're actually after. This part right here, honestly, it's my
favorite part of the whole process. So enjoyable,
especially like trying to crack it a little bit better each time and getting better pieces each time. I really, really love it. Okay, let me show you
two more things about cracking that are important
to know for the methods that I'm gonna show you in just a second. Here are shears, and here is a little
nutpick that I got from a design in Sam Theria's book. And if you have
pieces as you're going through that are like this,
they're kind of stuck in there, then you can come in with these shears, use them like that and pick them out, and then eventually come
in with something like a nutpick and pop them out of there, right? And we're gonna do that later. Do not worry about
doing that right now at this step. That's only gonna slow you down. Okay, so check it out right here. Here's a bunch that we have. Look at all that. Looks really, really amazing. Now we're gonna take all this and I'm gonna show
you guys the next step. Okay, so now we have our bowl right here. And looking at this,
I'm sure you're thinking, oh my God, that is going to take forever to go through and sort all of those. And it would if we
were doing them by hand, but we're not gonna do it by hand. We are gonna take
advantage of two physical properties of the nuts in order to extract them from all the rest of the stuff. The first one is the size, and the second one is the density. So starting off with the size. What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna use these little sorting trays right here. I have three different sizes. So we have a half inch, a fourth inch, and then an eighth inch. These you can pick up on Amazon. I think that they're
literally for gold panning or something, but I have found tons of uses for them in the realm of foraging as well. You could also just
make these out of hardware cloth if you wanted to. But what I really love about these mainly is that they're circular like this. So you can fit
them on a five gallon bucket and you can fit them on
top of a bowl perfectly like this. I use these all the time. I use them for processing black walnuts, hickories, acorns,
sumac, separating seeds. There are tons of uses for them. I really, really highly recommend them. This and all the other
tools that I'm using in this video are gonna be in the description in a kit that I have for all of you guys. Okay, so with that, let me
show you exactly what I'm doing to go through
sorting all the black walnuts. Okay, first thing that we're gonna do, we're gonna be working with
the largest size and going down. So here's the largest one. That's a half an inch. Taking all of this. I'm gonna do a little bit at a time. See that? And these are all the smaller pieces. So here is what we do next. So as you can see, some of
these are just completely shells. These are all just the shell. Perfect, so we can just take these, sorry, it's loud, take
these and discard them right away. But you can see here
that we also have some pieces that have a little bit of the nut meat that is still stuck on there. So now we can take
our shears and our nut pick and we can work through all of these and we can just do them all in one go and not have to
worry about taking care of that as we are doing another process. A lot of these will
fall into smaller pieces, but that's okay. Even if they're a little bit smaller, we are still gonna
be able to capture them in the next step. One thing to mention with this is that there is a point of diminished returns. I'm not going to, you know, I could spend a really long time making
sure to get perfect pieces out as I can, but in
the grand scheme of things, they're just gonna slow me down. And I don't need it to be perfect. That's not what I
personally am concerned about. You might be
different, but that's just me. Okay, so that's all
the pieces that I thought was worth finding
that I've gotten through. So I'll give it one more shake. And then these here are the
ones that go onto the next step. And here are the shells. And these are all
gonna go into the compost. Now for the next step. So I put all of these back in. The smaller bowl right there. Now we're gonna
take the fourth inch filter over here like that. And here we go. Same exact thing. Now all of our
smaller pieces, see all of those, all the smaller pieces are in here. This contains what we're really after. This is gonna contain our quarter pieces and the larger pieces of nut meat. Check that out. That is looking awesome. There's still a bunch of shells in there. And there's also
some good pieces right here. So really quick,
let's try to capture these with one more filter. Last one, here's the 1 eighth inch mesh. And you're used to it now. It's always to it. It's really easy at this point in time. We've gone through most of it. And this stuff, this particle size, I personally don't worry about. But now what are we gonna do with this? So now we have them all sorted out, but we still have a problem. We have all the nuts
mixed in with all of the shells. And right now it's about 50-50. At this point, many
people would probably tell you to just manually sort
through them one by one by hand. And with these larger
pieces in theory, that is possible. With the smaller ones
though, there's just no way. There's hundreds
of tiny pieces of nut meat and hundreds of tiny pieces of shells. And that's just not gonna happen. And that'd be a shame because there's plenty of
good black walnuts in here too. So we're now gonna rely on the second physical property, density. And we're gonna try to
use water to separate them. Ideally, one of them will
sink and the other one will float. So let's put them in
water and see what happens. So here's a bowl of water right here. Here's all the nut meat and the shells. I'm just going to toss in a little bit and we'll see what happens. Oh, it's not looking too bad. Well, maybe. So as you can see, they
are both sinking down there. So it would seem like we
can't use water to separate them. However, I've got a trick to show you that's still gonna make this possible. And this was the thing. This is what made me so excited to make and share this video with you. Watch this. I'm simply going to
start swirling the water. All right. Now, when we do that, you can see the shell
start to sink immediately, but the nut meat is
still really floating on the top. So we're gonna go outside and I'm gonna show
you how we can use this to get out just the nut meat. This is incredible. All right, you ready for this? Here we go. First swirling. All right, I'm gonna
let it settle for a second and now we're gonna pour. Okay. So look at that. We had three little shells there, maybe four very obvious, easy to take out and the rest of it is nut meat. How amazing is that? Okay, we still have more to go. So we're gonna do one more round of that. Just swirling it. That's all there is to it. Just swirling it. Okay, swirl and pour. (water splashing) And there you have it. Look at that. So amazing. So we still have a
few pieces of nut meat in here is maybe like five, six or so, but now it's 90%
shells and only 10% nut meat. At this point,
it's very easy to go through and just pick it out by hand. And all done. How crazy is that? Isn't that incredible? Okay, now let me show you that it works just as well for the smaller pieces. Here's all of our smaller pieces. I'm gonna use a taller bowl for this one. Everything goes in. And in this case, we
can actually use the fact that the nut meat will sink initially and all this other stuff will float to first pour off all the other stuff and then we'll move on to the nut meat. So let me do that really quick. (sizzling) All right, rest of
this right here is just skin. So now we're going to swirl. Look at that. Immediately kicks up
all the nut meat and then pour. Sorry, completely missed the frame. All right, let's see what we got there. So again, you know, we have
a few pieces of shells in there, very tiny, but we went
from having about 50-50 mix to maybe now 90% 10. And that is
feasible to sort through by hand. All right, so now
what should we do with this now that we have them all separated? And by the way,
listen, I don't wanna hear anyone talking about that
this is a huge waste of water or anything like that. I see that in my acorn videos as well. Listen, the amount of
water that we use right here in relation to an
American taking a single shower, it's completely negligible, all right? We have to put these things
in the proper perspective, okay? Now let's move on to the next step, like raining
outside and completely sunny. What is going on here? Great day for processing black walnuts. Okay, so I have all of
them cleaned off right here. Now, obviously we're not
gonna leave them wet like this. So I've got this tray right here that I'm going to set
them all out on like that. And because we
soaked them at the beginning, if you just leave them
right here like this to air dry, then they're probably gonna have a soft and chewy texture to them. If you like that, that's great. If you don't like
that, then you can put these on a dehydrator rack
and dehydrate them on low and they'll have
more of a snappy texture. And here is the final product. So with this, I usually refrigerate it. You can also freeze
it for long-term storage, especially if you have a large harvest. But we're not done. Remember, this was just the second half of the forgers
journey with black walnuts. The first half
involves efficiently gathering, holding and then cleaning the nuts. I have to wait for the
next season to make that video, but when it's done, it
will pop up right next to me. And if it hasn't, then you can subscribe for more wild food processing deep dives, just like this one. I hope to see you in the video. And if you could,
please, please share this video with a forging friend. I truly believe that
it can help a lot of people to build a deeper
relationship with black walnuts and discover more
of this amazing wild food. Thank you so much for watching.
