Recipe – Black Walnut Chutney

Fall heralds in the cool, crisp air, pumpkin-spiced everything, and the unsung hero – the black walnut. While black walnuts have a strong, bitter flavor, our ancestors knew how to appreciate them and craved their flavor all year long. To celebrate black walnut season (and Fall!) I’ve made this delicious black walnut chutney recipe to share with you all.

While English walnuts are tame and sweet, the black walnut is native to North America. In addition to it’s strong taste, the shells are much harder to crack than their English counterparts. Running them over with your tire, or cracking them with a hammer or vice are stories you’ll hear told around Appalachia, where they’re plentiful.

Walnuts are not easy to grow. They do not like a lot of competition, and are heavy feeders. Someone once told me that having a walnut tree in your front yard was a status symbol back in the day. It meant that you had quality soil, which meant that your farm was productive.

Growing up, we lived in a 300+ year old farm house, with a black walnut tree out front as big around as a VW beetle. Every summer and Fall we would pick up endless buckets of walnuts, and simply chuck them into the woods. To this day, that smell reminds me of childhood.

For more information, including tips and tricks and ethical concerns around foraging, check out Herbal Academy’s short course on Botany and Wildcrafting:

Nutritional Value of Black Walnuts

Amounts may very slightly depending on if you have a wild black walnut, or domesticated one, but generally speaking you can expect shelled black walnuts to contain 15% protein, 65% fat (good fat!), and 14% carbohydrates. The rest is compose of fiber and water.

1 cup of shelled black walnuts has 113% of your daily recommended total fats (great for that keto diet!), 36% of your daily Vitamin B6, and 21% of your daily Pantothenic Acid. It also contains 22% of your daily iron, 63% of your magnesium, 64% of your phosphorus, 28% of your daily zinc, 85% of your daily copper, and 243% of your manganese!

This is pretty important stuff because B6 is extremely hard to come by in a regular diet, as is zinc and copper. And recent studies have linked depression and anxiety to manganese deficiency!

Several studies have linked eating walnuts to lower rates of cancers and cardiovascular disease, as well as improved memory, cognition, learning and coordination.

How to Harvest Black Walnuts

Harvesting black walnuts takes a little bit of effort, but it’s well worth it. Don’t worry about picking them straight off the tree. If you’re lucky, the branches of your walnut tree will be well over your head, and they’re much easier to husk if you let it rot a little bit.

Remove the husk. Wearing gloves, use a hammer, or a knife, or simply roll them under the heel of your boot to crack the hull. Peel the hull away, and discard. Black walnut has a chemical in it that kills all plants around it. I’ve read that you can compost it, but I’d rather not risk it. It’s also medicinally been used as a dewormer, so might be worth crumbling up and giving to your chickens?

Lay out the walnuts to dry in a warm, sunny location for a few days. The drier the nuts are, the easier they are to crack. Just make sure wherever you store them, it’s away from any squirrels or nut-loving creatures.

Once thoroughly dried, crack open with a hammer or vice and pick out the stubborn meat with a small metal pick – a nut pick, or crab pick works well. We’ll be chopping up the nut anyway, so it doesn’t matter how cracked and small the pieces are.