Collecting the nuts can be a seasonal chore. But, for their admirers, which include some of the country’s most acclaimed chefs, a bucketful is a blessing.
Every summer and fall, the black walnut tree in my in-laws’ front yard in Polk City, Iowa, would pelt their lot with greenish-yellow nuts that could chip mower blades, trip runners and stain sidewalks a necrotic black as they began to rot.
“It was a tree from hell,” my mother-in-law, Jill Cook, said. “It seemed evil in its intent.”
She and my father-in-law were dumping at least a half-dozen five-gallon buckets of nuts into the trash every week, she said. Keeping up was wearing them out, even with occasional help from their young grandson, who was happy to make a few bucks per bucket.
The eastern black walnut (Juglans nigra) can rain down nuts in biblical quantities.Credit…Terra Fondriest for The New York Times
Two years ago, she hired a tree service to take it out. She says she has never regretted it.
That’s the relationship many Americans, from the East Coast to the Plains, have with the eastern black walnut (Juglans nigra), a native tree with dark, tire-tread bark that spikes the soil around it with juglone, a chemical toxic to some plants, and rains down nuts in biblical quantities. (A tree monitored by a University of Missouri student produced 3,789 nuts in a single season.)
For many, collecting the nuts is a tiresome seasonal chore. But for some of the country’s most acclaimed chefs, a bucket of black walnuts is a blessing.
Sean Brock, a Nashville-based chef and author known for his exploration of Southern food cultures, calls them “a Top 5 favorite ingredient.”
The chef Sean Brock calls black walnuts “a Top 5 favorite ingredient.”Credit…Julie Goldstone for The New York Times
A longtime black walnut champion, Mr. Brock admits to sneaking nuts from his neighbor’s yard. He has recently been serving his grandmother’s black walnut fudge to uninitiated diners at Darling, his restaurant in Los Angeles.
“There’s a chemical compound in there that makes my brain buzz the way truffles do,” he said.
“The English walnuts that everybody can go to the store and buy have been bred specifically to have a much softer, more subtle flavor,” Mr. Brock said. “A black walnut can be a blast of aroma and flavor, almost like a red wine.”
The chef John Shields of Smyth in Chicago said, “It’s a very strong flavor that stands up to a seared scallop or a piece of lamb in a way other nuts don’t.”
The details of that flavor can be difficult to articulate even for Mr. Shields, who has been working the nuts into his high-end menus since first encountering them in Virginia in the 2000s.
How to describe the flavor of black walnuts? “The two words to remember, if you forget everything else, are bold and wild,” said Brian Hammons, chief executive of Hammons Products Company of Stockton, Mo.Credit…Terra Fondriest for The New York Times
Asked for a few adjectives, he said he needed some time. Two days later, he texted, “At the end of the day, the black walnut’s flavor reminds me of itself and Mother Nature.”
He added: “It’s damp-tasting, not unlike a mushroom, with mild citrus notes when still very young. It’s like if a nut were a tuber that grows under the soil.”
Another prominent chef, Gabrielle Hamilton, writing in New York Times Cooking, described the flavor as “somewhere between menthol and mold.” Others have cited grapefruit, bubble gum, black licorice and wood smoke.
There are, in fact, a couple of officially sanctioned adjectives that black walnut fans can borrow, courtesy of the American Black Walnut Marketing Board and its main benefactor, Hammons Products Company of Stockton, Mo.
Hammons is the only remaining large-scale black walnut processor in the world.Credit…Terra Fondriest for The New York Times
“The two words to remember, if you forget everything else, are bold and wild,” Brian Hammons, the company’s third-generation chief executive, told a tour group during Stockton’s annual Black Walnut Festival in September.
If you’ve eaten a store-bought black walnut in the past 30 or 40 years, chances are it probably passed through Hammons’s unassuming campus at the edge of the Ozarks.
The company is the only remaining large-scale black walnut processor in the world, collecting millions of pounds of wild black walnuts at more than 160 strategically located processing facilities — called “hulling stations” — across the Midwest and the South. Amateur foragers drop off truckloads of nuts collected from backyards, family farms and suburban side streets, receiving $14 per 100 pounds after hulling. Hammons then sells them to major retailers, including Kroger, Publix and Walmart.
The walnuts being loaded into a huller.Credit…Terra Fondriest for The New York Times
The production line at Hammons in Stockton, Mo.Credit…Terra Fondriest for The New York Times
Inside Hammons Black Walnut Emporium. The company sells the nuts to major retailers, including Kroger, Publix and Walmart.Credit…Terra Fondriest for The New York Times
Black walnuts may have a broader appeal today than they did when Mr. Hammons’s grandfather, Ralph, started the family business out of his grocery store in the mid-1940s.
They certainly have more cultural cachet. Once about as cool as grandma’s fruitcake, where they may have played a supporting role, they’re now a secret handshake in some culinary circles, along with other wild harvests like pawpaws and ramps.
In Columbus, Ohio, Watershed Distillery makes an inky black walnut nocino — a New World version of a bittersweet Italian liqueur — using a local doctor’s family recipe. White Rose Miso, founded by two East Coast fine-dining veterans, sells an intensely flavored black walnut miso out of Dover, Pa. (The product’s description acknowledges its “divisive appeal.”) White Rose Miso’s sister business, Keepwell Vinegar, offers a Worcestershire-like “bay sauce,” an infusion of young black walnut leaves and spices resurrected from a 19th century cookbook.
Back in Missouri, Piney River Brewing Company in Bucyrus has found an unlikely hit in its black walnut wheat beer, a dark ale with an undercurrent of mellow, fruity black walnut flavor.
At Piney River Brewing Company, black walnuts feature in a wheat ale.Credit…Terra Fondriest for The New York Times
Growing up in the Ozarks, Joleen Durham, one of Piney River’s founders, took part in the annual ritual of picking up black walnuts and carting them to the hulling station. But she didn’t expect her experiment in local flavor to become the brewery’s flagship. “It was totally consumer demand,” she said.
Of course, most of America’s black walnuts never see the inside of a brewery or a kitchen. As any squirrel could tell you, excavating the buttery, umami-rich nuts from the heaps of biomass in yard waste bins is a labor-intensive process, complicated by the finger-staining hulls and shells so hard they’re used as a commercial abrasive.
That’s why black walnut fans have become so reliant on Hammons.
“It’s not an easy industry,” Mr. Hammons said. His last serious competitor stopped processing black walnuts in 2002. “It is challenging every year. It’s challenging to get the nuts, to process them, and it’s not super lucrative.”
Amateur foragers drop off truckloads of nuts collected from backyards, family farms and suburban side streets.Credit…Terra Fondriest for The New York Times
It’s still worth doing, he said, as a business and as a higher calling: “We get letters almost every year from people saying, ‘Oh my gosh, I had forgotten about black walnuts. I was in Walmart, and I saw your package, and tears came to my eyes because I remembered the taste of grandma’s cake.’”
Even for my mother-in-law, who is unsentimental about her own black walnut tree, the nuts evoke a more full-flavored past. Her grandparents baked cakes and cookies with the walnuts that grew wild on their Iowa farm.
“I do like them,” Jill told me. “I just prefer to buy them.”
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