Nut Crackers

[Burning Petard]

I like nuts as a snack. All kinds. My family gives me sacks of mixed nuts in the shell as a gift for various special occasions. Peanuts are good, but quickly boring.
Pistachios are nice and tasty, but expensive. Those two are easily shelled without tools But the rest! I grew up with Black Walnuts as a common activity to keep neighborhood kids busy and relatively harmless--if you ignored the stains. The tool of choice there was a flat rock, an ordinary carpenter's roughing hammer, and a small nail. Black walnuts are not that common in the grocery store. I love the flavor, specially in baking. It is the best nut for that purpose. Use black walnuts instead in a pecan pie recipe. Wonderful. But the nut is hard to crack and the edible bits come out in very small pieces.

So I have tried various nut crackers and they all seem over elaborate (the things made like a variation of a car bumper jack, specially for black walnuts for example) or take too much muscle, or tend to smash everything with too much leverage.

This became important when my son got a job in Oklahoma and he started sending me big sacks of pecans, that cost him less than a pound of the things in my local grocery store. Now it seems the ideal solution:


A not-too-large Channel-Lock pliers.

It does the job, in a controlled fashion for easy almond and english walnuts, or tough Brazil nuts, and all the stuff in between. Admit I have not tried it on Black Walnuts. For those, I revert to my childhood favorite.

snailgate

[wesw]

good memories....

we had a pecan tree in the yard when I was in 2nd and 3rd grades.... and I would crack the nuts with my little hammer from my little tool kit that I got for Christmas.....

my mom saw me one day (we were all 'free range' kids back then) , and had a conniption ,she was surethat I was eating some poisonous fruit.....

my dad reassured her that it was fine, but I still had to sneak them after that.....

thanks BP gate!

( I have a black walnut tree in my yard now, but haven t found an efficient way to shell the darned things either. like you, I only get small bits of meat)

[kmccune]

Pecan trees hardly produce anything around here and I thought that strange ,I planted a couple and never got the first nut .Hickory trees do fairly well and bear ,so I figured the pecans would also,use a hammer on the black walnuts and a nutpicker on top a big block of wood .

[Gob]

[MajGenl.Meade]

But what if you don't have electric nuts?