Yesterday afternoon, we did what is called "a float test" on the hickory nuts. It's called that because you fill a vessel (a large bucket or trough) with water and toss in a bunch of hickory nuts. Those that sink are denser than the water so you know they're loaded with nutty goodness. Those that float may be bad. The floaters need to be paid more attention -- a worm could have gotten in or the nut may have rotted inside the shell. Some floaters are still good, though. You don't know until you crack it open.
After doing the float test, we found some that passed.
A lot of them failed the test. We were surprised by the large proportion. We suspect that we shouldn't have left the nuts out to dry as long as we did.
We started cracking into the hickory nuts. Of the ones we got into, maybe 1/5 of the total were bad for one reason or another.
We are keeping the hickory shells for now. We've read that they are a very pleasant addition to a wood fire.
We are also experimenting with different methodologies of breaking them open. Wifey used a nutcracker while I used a pair of channel-locks. I tried the nutcracker first, before trying the channel-locks. I felt like I had more control over the channel-locks, could impart more force on the nut thanks to the longer lever arms, and could grip the nuts better thanks to the teeth on the wrench.
We're still working on the approach. As you can tell from the picture above, there is some wasted nut meat that we left inside the shell. We decided it wasn't worth spending a ton of time trying to get every little bit out, especially, when some had been tainted by shell shards in the meat. We'd rather abandon some of the nut meat than take a chance in feeding shell to someone.
The walnut bits that we did keep are in the freezer until we get cracking, again.
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