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Missouri’s official state tree may be the dogwood, but our official state tree nut (yes, as a matter of fact, we do have one) is the eastern black walnut, no doubt because more black walnut trees grow in Missouri than just about anywhere else. All across the state, but particularly down in the Ozarks, roving bands of nut gatherers are fanning out to hunt for the earthy, intense and devilishly-hard-to-crack nut.
“I’ve seen them come in every which way,” says David Hammons, vice president of marketing at Hammons Products Company in Stockton, Missouri, the largest black walnut supplier in the world. “People come in with trash cans, barrels, baskets, or they just fill the back of their pickup. I remember one lady threw a tarp down in the back of her station wagon, and it was just full.”
You see, black walnut trees are finicky and stubborn (Hammons compares them to another official Missouri state symbol—the mule). More to the point, they can be downright hostile. They produce a chemical called juglone that can be toxic to many plants, including other black walnut trees, making them tough to grow in an orchard. Hence, the Hammons family has been relying on amateur nut gatherers to collect the wild crop every autumn since 1946, when David’s great-grandfather Ralph started the company.
Today, black walnuts are the largest single agricultural crop in the country that’s still gathered from the wild, according to Hammons. This year, the company expects to collect 25 million pounds of nuts, up from 10 million pounds last year. (Most black walnut trees are naturally--and somewhat mysteriously--synchronized to a biannual cycle, producing more nuts one year and essentially taking it easy the next.) Hammons organizes about 200 “hulling stations,” mostly in Missouri but as far away as Ohio and Oklahoma, where locals can drop off their bounty. It all conjures up the kind of Norman Rockwell vision that you’re not going to get with your Chilean blueberries or Mexican tomatoes: Boy Scouts lugging five-gallon buckets filled with nuts, showing up in front of their small-town farm co-op looking to make a little extra cash for their troop.
So how best to savor this bona fide Show-Me State delicacy? Even Hammons doesn’t recommend simply trying to snack on them. “They’re an ingredient nut,” he says. Black walnuts are earthy and floral (think truffles), but more than anything, they’re bold, much more so than their milquetoast counterpart, the English walnut.
Josh Galliano, executive chef at Monarch in Maplewood, agrees. “A little definitely goes a long way,” he says. But he likes the nut’s complex flavor profile, which he says has almost a fermented quality with a hint of grapefruit thrown in. Galliano has experimented using black walnuts in heavier gratins paired with bold meats, like pheasant, as well as in coconut chocolate balls atop cakes, where they act almost like a liqueur. Monarch currently features candied black walnuts in its green salad.
And you can experiment with them yourself at home. From now through the holiday season, Hammons-brand black walnuts are available at local retailers like Dierbergs and Schnucks.
Editor's Note: Recently and coincidentally, SLM's Dave Lowry discovered even more about Missouri's black walnuts. His observations were published last week here.
