It's Fall. Go Nuts! (Hickory, Gingko, Acorn)

October 26, 2019

If I were trying to make it through a long New England winter strictly from foraging, I'd want a food that was dense in calories, could be collected in bulk, and easily stored. The answer? Nuts.

HICKORIES

Shagbark hickory bark. To the left--the four part hull, and the pale colored shell of the hickory nut

I grew up near the woods. It was easy to gather several quarts of hickory nuts; my compatriots and I would sit in the driveway, cracking them with a rock or a hammer, and picking out the meat. Hickory nuts are sweet and mild, but a little challenging to get out of the shell, which folds around the meat in nooks and crannies. This is where those little silver picks that come with nutcrackers (and are only ever seen at Thanksgiving) actually come in handy.

Hickory nuts are easily identified by their pale, thick, brawny shells. Some that you'll find on the ground are still enclosed in their four-part husk. The tastiest nuts are produced by the shagbark hickory (can you figure out where it gets its name?). Hickory nuts, if stored in a cool, dry place, will keep through the winter, and frozen, several years.

GINGKOS

Graceful Gingko, in fall

Where I went to college, there was a park lined with trees that many students would walk through to get from their apartments to campus. In October, certain paths became foul-smelling. Sitting in class, you could tell who had walked through the park, because it smelled like they had tracked in dog-doo. Eventually I realized that the odor was caused by these trees with graceful, gangly branches and beautiful, fan-shaped leaves: Gingkos.

I was fascinated to see women of Asian descent foraging under the Gingkos. What could they possibly be picking, I wondered--how could anything so foul-smelling be edible? As an adult I decided to solve that mystery. A little research and I learned that, if you can get past that smelly fruit, inside the Gingko berry is a nut that is edible when roasted.

Gingkos are ancient trees that haven't changed since the time of the dinosaurs. They were imported to America from Asia to be planted as street trees, because they are pretty impervious to city conditions such as auto exhaust and salt runoff. The trees can be male or female. City arborists try to select only the male trees, because of the messy stench of the female tree's fallen fruit.

Gingko berries are the oval to round, and they look like small apricots. If you pick them up by the stem, you won't get too much stink on your hands. I found it easy to separate the fruit from the seed by collecting the fruit into a plastic bag, adding water, mushing the mixture with my hands through the bag, then dumping out the pulp in a section of the yard nobody uses. After several washes, the nuts were pretty clean and surprisingly un-smelly. Keeping the fruit in a bag away from your hands is a good idea because apparently the fruit contains urushiol, the same compound as poison ivy. (FYI: I did touch the fruit quite a bit, and didn't have a reaction, though I am deathly allergic to poison ivy.)

The first recipe I tried recommended roasting the nuts in the oven for an hour. Let me assure you: if you roast these seeds for an hour, they will become totally dried out and end up the texture of beetle shells and broken glass. The next recipe I tried suggested putting them in salted boiling water, swirling them around with a ladle (I used a wooden spoon) to remove the papery skin. They came out a bit like gummy edamame, but tasty.

The recipe I found most promising was one that indicated putting the nuts in a pan on medium-high with a little olive oil and cooking (swirling occasionally) until the shells cracked, revealing a neon-green nut. Remove the shell and the skin, add a little salt, et voila! you end up with an umami treat similar to a pistachios. These little Gingko babies are skewered and served as snacks in Japanese izakaya restaurants.

This approach yielded the most flavorful fruits, though I am still perfecting my technique. As when cooking popcorn, you definitely want to put a lid on your pan, else risk being spattered with oil and nut shards. Unlike popcorn, it seems best to take the pan off the heat as soon as a first few have exploded--otherwise they end up a little overcooked and crisped like Corn Nuts.

In Asia, Gingko is considered an aphrodisiac and a treatment for Alzheimer's and other diseases. As with any medicine, "more" is not better: sources recommend fewer than ten nuts per day for adults, five for kids.

ACORNS

Contrary to popular belief, Acorns--the nut of the oak tree--are not poisonous. In fact, they were a food staple of Native Americans. This was a banner year for Acorns here in Massachusetts: they were underfoot everywhere (making all of us look like a slapstick sketch), pinging the roofs of cars, popping under tires, littering the streets. Given the volume of Acorns available this year, I couldn't resist picking a pound or two off the ground, with the intent of turning them into Acorn flour.

I'm still experimenting to find the best way to process Acorns--which basically involves many changes of water to leach out the bitter tannins--but I don't want to hold up this post until my experiment concludes. I will get back to you, soon, to share the outcome of my Acorn experiment.