After six weeks of curing, these were my walnuts. It was no surprise that curing them was by far the easiest step in the process.
Cracking the walnuts wasn’t exactly difficult, just tedious. Black walnuts are notoriously hard and will break regular nut crackers. Therefore, I needed a special nut cracker — a hammer and anvil.
It’s messy and takes a long time, but it’s not a bad way to spend a morning with a cup of coffee and a pipe. I wound up having to put on a pair of safety glasses. These things can really fly apart when they finally break. There actually is a technique to breaking them properly. You hit the nut pretty hard several times all the way around, then settle on the fat side and hit it harder until it cracks. That yields some pretty large chunks. If you do it wrong, you end up with this:
As you can see, really difficult to remove. Breaking the shell further from this point usually results in mostly crushed pieces of nut meat.
After three hours, this is what I had. I really like black walnuts, but about half of the nuts I cracked were spoiled from over-curing. Shoulda cracked ‘em after five weeks, I guess. I’m going to pitch the rest and give it a better try next year. For a learning experience, I’m happy enough with the way it turned out.
