The Gift Of Black Walnuts: 5 Recipes To Savor All Fall Long

If you've never been jarred awake by the ruckus of racquetball-size black walnuts plummeting from high up in a tree down to a tin roof, you’ve missed out on a quintessential Southern experience. It’s a sound that’s all too familiar to my husband, Patrick, whose family’s South Mississippi property is graced by a large black walnut tree with limbs that shade an old chicken coop. 

I didn’t grow up eating black walnuts, other than in ice cream, but Patrick did. He enjoyed gathering those lime-green bombs that hurtled toward the ground every September and October and inhaling their scent, a spicy, citrusy aroma that always made him sneeze. The work of getting to the meat of the nuts deterred most folks from fooling with them—after cracking into an impossibly hard outer husk comes the chore of breaking through the bone-tough interior shell, both of which notoriously stain hands (and the mouths of enterprising squirrels).

Back in the day, you would have to really love them to crack them, and the reward was an unparalleled taste: profoundly earthy, tannic, bitter, and faintly sweet, with much more complexity than the traditional English walnuts. When I first tried a fresh one that Patrick had dissected for me—rather than just eating the ice-cream flavor—I was blown away.

Interestingly, those hard inner shells can be used in products ranging from abrasive cleaners to water filtration to even dynamite filler. But it’s the meat, of course, that’s the true prize. Since the shell is so hard to break into, you won’t find intact walnut halves, as you do with English ones, but rather little nuggets and pieces. They’re soft and rich with oil and have that distinctive taste that is nothing at all like the mildness of any other nut.

Because they are so unique and fragrant, black walnuts won’t settle for a supporting role in a recipe. They are the defining ingredient in anything they make their way into, whether imbuing an apple pie with incomparable robustness, permeating banana bread with their distinctive depth, adding welcome savory notes to a fall salad, or peppering a pasta dish with flavor. And yes, when they’re combined with heavy cream and some sweetened condensed milk, they can make an absolutely killer ice cream.

Check out the recipes below that put the precious nut to good use.

Buying Black Walnuts

Thankfully, you don’t have to go through all the effort of shelling whole walnuts anymore, as you can find them more easily in stores these days. The official tree nut of Missouri, they thrive there in abundance and are mostly scooped up by foragers and landowners who have trees on their properties. They’re not orchard grown but instead represent a wild crop dependent on hand harvesting.

At the forefront of their increased availability in stores lies the Missouri-based Hammons Products Company. You’ll often see their nuts for sale in the produce or baking section of supermarkets. The family-run business keeps a sustainable black walnut industry alive, sourcing them from folks who sell their bounty at more than 215 hulling and buying locations across the South and Midwest.