where the wild things are. no.4. black walnuts. a tough nut to crack.

 

I am definitely into squirreling away Black Walnuts this year!

While working in Hudson, New York this past week we stopped to gather a bushel that had fallen from a tree we spotted at the woods edge.

Gathering and cleaning Black Walnuts can be a bit of an ordeal, but totally worth the time.The walnuts can be gathered once they have dropped to the ground. Pick them up when they have a green husk. They can then be laid out to age in a dry spot until the husk turns a yellow brown. At that point the outer husk will come off fairly easily, however if you have any trouble just circle around the husk with a small sharp paring knife. Make sure to wear gloves while removing the husk, as the tannins will stain your fingers. The hull should be removed to allow the walnuts to dry out. If the husk is left on, the heat caused by the decomposition of the hull will change the flavor of the walnut. I do know some people who prefer to leave the nut in the hull for a year or more before removing it because they feel it ages the walnut like a great wine or cheese. 

Once the nuts are free of the husk it is best to let them sit a month or two to age. Lay them out on newspaper or brown paper bags. The dryer the nut, the easier it will be to remove the nutmeat without damaging it. I leave them to dry for a few months or more in a well-squirreled proofed place! 

There is much written about the black walnut being that it is a very tough nut crack. You will find many bizarre and unfamiliar suggestions  such as driving over it with a car or wearing heavy work boots to crack the shell, however I have found that a small hammer or a vice will do just fine without damaging the meat inside.

The black walnut has a distinct taste and smell that is unlike the commercial walnut that most of us are used to. Black Walnuts taste of dirt, mushrooms and wine and smell a tiny bit sour, but I promise they taste delicious! The taste is very earthy and lends an interesting rich flavor to many foods. Use them anywhere you would use walnuts.

Recently I made a raw milk panna cotta with a maple and black walnut glaze. I also dropped some into a jar of local honey and served the honey and walnuts with an aged tilsit. Add them to a pesto for an earthiness or to a traditional brownie recipe for an earthy bite.

Next year I will  try pickling black walnuts which has to be done before the shell starts to harden. 

 PANNA COTTA WITH MAPLE AND BLACK WALNUT

Adapted from an Alice Water's recipe from the Chez Panisse Cookbook.

1/4 ounce package of unflavored gelatin

flavorless vegetable oil or almond oil

vanilla bean

3 cups of heavy cream

1 cup of whole milk (I used raw milk)

1/4 cup sugar

Put three tablespoons of cold water in a stainless steel bowl, sprinkle on the gelatin and set aside to soften.

 Lightly brush the ramekins or vessels you will be using with the almond oil or vegetable oil. Set them aside in the fridge to chill while proceeding with the recipe.

Cut the vanilla bean and scrape the inside into a medium sized sauce pan along with the cream, sugar and milk.

Bring to a simmer and cook for about a minute.

Remove from the heat and let the cream mixture cool, stirring occasionally for ten minutes or so.

Pour about one cup or so over the softened gelatin.

Stir until the gelatin is completely dissolved, pour it back into the remaining cream mixture and stir well.

Strain through a fine mesh sieve and pour into ramekins or vessels.

Refrigerate for four hours or overnight.

If you are turning the Panna Cotta out of the ramekin, slide a knife around the outside the panna cotta and turn out onto a dish.

I choose to leave them in their vessels.

Maple Black Walnut Glaze.

1/2 cup pure maple syrup

4 black walnuts 

shell the walnuts and coarsely chop. Set aside.

Put the 1/2 cup of maple syrup in a sauce pan and heat on medium heat until it just simmers. Turn it down to low and cook for 5 minutes to thicken slightly.

Spoon the warm maple syrup over the individual panna cotta and add a few pieces of black walnut to each.

Serve while the syrup is warm.

 

 

 Copyright © 2011 Andrea Gentl all rights reserved 

sugar house

 

New Yorkers are somewhat crazy by nature, but transplanted New Englanders are even crazier... which is why my loft smells like a sugar house long about now. We feel the need to keep all things New England with us, close at heart, and in doing so we tend to cart things all over the place in an attempt to bring the country to the city. When I was younger it was apples, blueberries and flowers by the bucketful from my parent's garden in Massachusetts. We carefully drove said flowers from Massachusetts to New York City, car fully loaded. Then it was vegetables from a farm stand on Long Island. It has at times been old glass and linens (more than is humanly possible!) from the country flea markets in the south of France. Now, it is furniture, vegetables, wild ramp, jam, great huge dogwood branches from upstate New York, and finally, in an effort to not miss the syruping season, it is sap... We tapped our trees in upstate New York before we went to Mexico. When we came back a week later, we drove up to check on the progress. The conditions have been fairly stellar this year. Before we left we ran lines from three Sugar Maples with two taps per tree into large galvanized water troughs. We sealed the top of the trough so no snow or rain could get in. After a week away we had about 30 gallons of sap. We began our well practiced ritual of carting and squirreling back to the city. We filled five 5 gallon recycled plastic water containers with the sap we had collected and brought it back to boil down in our loft. We were committed to doing it this way or we would have missed the season entirely, as we didn't have the time to spare to be upstate outside over a fire 24/7. So far it's been working marvelously, with the exception of the steamy windows. We started boiling down two mornings ago. We have been at it continuously. We started with 25 gallons and are down to about 12. It takes roughly 40 gallons of sap to make a gallon of syrup, so if all goes according to plan by tomorrow this time we should have a 1/2 gallon of beautiful grade a maple syrup. You may wonder if all of this work really seems worth it when there are so many great syrup makers out there. For me, making syrup is a nostalgic thing. It is something we did every year when I was kid, sometimes the whole neighborhood got in on he action. Growing up in Massachusetts, we  didn't use plastic  lines like most people seem to do these days. Instead, we drove the same taps we had used year after year into our trees and hung much loved and much used galvanized  buckets and their little hoods from tree to tree. We emptied the buckets before and after school. We prayed secretly for a snow day so we could be there for the final boil down when we would pour the hot syrup over the pristine snow to make long strands of gooey maple candy. We always had enough sypup to last the year, or nearly the year, if the hidden stockpile stayed well out of reach of little hands. I don't hope to make that much at all, but I do hope to create a somewhat nostalgic moment in my own kids lives. I hope wherever they end up, city or country, they become squirrelers too.

SYRUP UPDATE

Day three of the boiling down...

We boiled down at a roiling boil for 12 hours the first day and twelve hours the second day. We turned it off at night. We are now down to the final concentrated pot of sap. The clear liquid has turned a beautiful amber. I am imagining that by this afternoon it will be done. I have to keep a close eye on it now so it doesn't burn or get too thick.

Voila... it is done. I had to strain it through four layers of cheesecloth to get rid of any bits of twigs or sediment.

The syrup tastes AMAZING! A friend told me about a book she read to her daughter called Maple Syrup Season. The book is for children, but goes into great detail about the taste of syrup.The first run often tastes slightly floral and is more delicate than the second or third run which gets progressively darker by nature (hence the syrup grading system) and more intensely maple in flavor.

Week two.

We are now on round three of boiling down. Hopefully by the end we will have two solid gallons of maple syrup!

 

 Copyright © 2011 Andrea Gentl all rights reserved

sap for the soul

 sap and dried steele cut oats. use maple  sap in place of water in recipes 

 Copyright © 2011 Andrea Gentl all rights reserved

It seems there has been a lot buzz lately about the benefits of drinking maple sap. I have heard of a few companies in Canada starting to produce sap drinks and friends in Brooklyn are contemplating a company selling the stuff. We have some friends who live up in Northern Vermont. They are,  among other things, Wildcrafters and Plant Spirit Medicine experts. They really know how to use the land and thier surroundings with thought and care and with a truely sustainable spirit. You will see and hear more about them here over time, as we are currently working on a documentary about them; but more on that later. When I spoke to Nova Kim of wild gourmet food earlier this week she told me that they had given up water for a while and turned to drinking sap during the maple season,  (she said they are drinking about 80% sap to 20% water).  Anyone and everyone who has ever collected syrup has tasted the sweet nutrient, mineral rich sap. It is impossible to resist the taste. The liquid is clear like water and has a delicate sweetness that is so light and faint and almost mildly floral.

Sap has an enormous amount of calcium and iron and other minerals and has been used for it's health benefits for thousands of years in Korea, China , Japan and amongst Native Americans.. There is evidence that Native Americans drank sap for purification purposes. There is a very interesting  article in the New York Times that chronicles South Korean's love affair with maple sap. They drink Fifty gallons per person at a time. They believe they sweat out the toxins and replace the fluids with sap. They call thier maple the "tree for the good bones" as the sap is full of calcium and helps with osteoporosis.

Overall, Nova contends that it, basically, adds a touch of sweetness to everything, a completely natural sweetness. She obtains the health benefits of sap by drinking it straight and using it in her everyday cooking. In the morning she occaisionaly makes oatmeal with it, substituting it anywhere she would normally use water. She recently made a fifteen bean stew with a sap base. She used a smoked ham hock and the sap as the base flavor to her bean stew. She threw it all in a crockpot and let it rip. I love this kind of one pot cooking. I will see if I can  wrangle a recipie from her, but you get the basic idea. 

if you are not tapping your own trees, you can find a sugar house or a farmer near you and perhps buy some sap from them. ( go to your local farmers market and talk to the syrup guys) It does take roughly forty gallons of sap to make one gallon of syrup. Syrup has commanded some pretty high prices in the past few years based on availability due to shorter sap seasons and climate change. The sap start to flow when the days are warm  (over 40 degrees and the nights are below freezing) the word is that this will be a long cool spring and that makes for an excellent syrup season. If you are lucky and persistent, you may find a farmer willing to part with some of the good stuff or...you can revert to some yankee ingenuity and go find a maple tree, get a drill then tap in a spout, and wait patiently for the plunk plunk plunk... not only will you and your family have a greater appreciation for where your food comes from, but it will be all that much sweeter for your efforts.

 

 NOTE: as with any kind of harvesting...it is important to do it with care and sustainability. Don't overtap your trees! You will bleed them to death!!