Walnuts:
-Harvested a 5 gallon bucketful in the fall at the farm
-Husked them by rolling them between our hands or under our feet
-Dried them in the attic for a week
-Cracked them using Neal's "Super Duper Nut Cracker" (supposedly the best all around nut cracker from Lehman's). Pieces were flying all over the living room so we started cracking them inside a box.
-Extracted pieces of nut meat using an awl and wire cutters. (Neal voted this as the most time consuming part of all)
-Sorted all the pieces (to make sure the shells were out of there since they are quite rough on the teeth)
-Ate little walnut pieces on a variety of foods (our favorite way was toasted and sprinkled on butternut soup)
Acorns:
-Harvested during hikes at the cabin up north in early November and stuffed them in our pockets*
-Poured water over nuts in a bucket. Ones that floated weren't worth keeping
-Tried numerous options for cracking the nuts, but favored drying them in the oven and cracking them with plyers
-Poured water over nut meat in a bucket again. Rotten pieces and shells floated to the top and could be tossed
[HERE IS WHERE THERE IS HUGE ROOM FOR IMPROVEMENT]
-Soaked the acorns in water to remove the bitter tannins every day for over a month with a result of the insides of the acorn meat still tasting very bitter.
[HERE IS WHAT WE SHOULD HAVE DONE]
-Used a food processor to chop the acorn pieces as finely as possible (then soak on a regular basis until the tannins were gone)
-Baked the acorn flour/meal into a cornmeal bread
*(Note: We used acorns from red oaks because that is what we had available. We think white oaks would have been far less bitter, but still would have required some soaking)
