Right now, black walnuts look like small neon green tennis balls clustered on a branch. Their interiors are creamy and gelatinous.
Danny Childs, the founder of Slow Drinks — who is currently in the midst of opening his first cocktail bar, Field Day — uses black walnuts in this state for black walnut nocino, a variant of the bittersweet Italian liqueur known as amaro. “When I make amari in general, it’s always a way to showcase a certain place at a certain time,” said Childs, who forages his black walnuts from a running trail in Merchantville.
“When you’re making nocino, you pick them in June,” Childs said. “The knife can easily pierce the black walnut, as the actual nut hasn’t formed yet. It’s still a jellylike substance.”
Childs uses 151 proof vodka from Devil’s Springs in New Jersey to macerate his walnuts. His black walnut nocino is also on the menu at Almanac, featured in their cocktail the Juban District. It’s blended with Japanese whiskey, scotch, vermouth, Okinawan Kokuto brown sugar, and bitters. It’s funky and savory, and sweet without being cloying. And it has become a classic cocktail on Almanac’s menu.
And so, the Almanac team has also just gone foraging for black walnuts.
At Field Day, Childs’ black walnut repertoire will expand. “We’re going to start using the walnuts in other ways after nocino this year — to infuse wine to make nociato, and then use them to make black walnut miso.” He’s working with fermenter Jamaar Julal, previously of Honeysuckle, on these projects.
Look closely, and you’ll start to see black walnuts everywhere, from shortbread cookies at Ellen Yin’s Bread Room to Randy Rucker’s sauces for seafood at Little Water.
Crisped up in a pan, the Heavy Metal Sausage’s mortadella, inlaid with cubes of smoked pork jowl and hard toasted black walnuts, emits a heady aroma of pork and socks. It is funky, distinctive, and heavenly; it tastes milder than its scent, like uncured bacon that had nestled next to a blue cheese for a few days in the fridge.
Pat Alfiero, Heavy Metal’s co-owner and butcher, sources shelled black walnuts from Ian Brendle of Green Meadow Farm in Gap, Pa., who has about 100 black walnut trees on his property. Brendle also functions as a middleman, shuttling nutmeats processed just south of Pennsylvania to chefs.
“To me, black walnuts are very unique, like pawpaws. If you had a hundred people eat them, half would like them and half would hate them. Pawpaws have the same unctuous floral perfume as black walnuts,” said Brendle, who now sells five to 10 pounds of shelled black walnuts every week, twice as much as when he started selling them two decades ago.
“They’re a misunderstood tree nut, for sure. But any nut or plant that can be foraged sustainably should be consumed. Anytime you can consume something that doesn’t require immense amounts of water or makes a negative impact is a step in the right direction,” said Brendle.
Black walnut trees are found in dense thickets in Fairmount Park, and on practically every farm and expansive backyard in and around Philadelphia. They’re native to the Mid-Atlantic, like hickory nuts and pecans. They swath the East Coast, growing as far north as the border with Ontario and as far south as Florida.
Every part of the black walnut contains juglone, which is toxic to many other plants, but perfectly safe for humans and animals to consume. For many gardeners and homeowners, black walnuts are a nuisance, staining hands if you gather them without gloves on, as well as the asphalt driveways on which they fall. The nuts get caught in lawn mowers and can also be dangerous projectiles, falling from great heights — the trees can grow up to 80 feet tall — denting car roofs and unlucky heads.
If nuts could talk, black walnuts would say, “They don’t like us, we don’t care.”
For Alfiero, Brendle, and the others, there is an urgency to using black walnuts. Nut farming is water intensive, and the almond industry in California has repeatedly come under scrutiny for its groundwater consumption. The walnuts in a typical supermarket are the Persian or English variety. In the U.S., 99% of them also come from California. It takes about 26.7 gallons of water to grow an ounce of English walnuts.
“We’ve created so many problems for ourselves in the world, simply by being spoiled and being able to purchase, say, pistachios at the store. People grow almonds and other nuts in places that don’t naturally have a lot of water. We’ve created a market for things that don’t make sense,” said Jeremiah Langhorne of the Dabney in Washington D.C, one of the chefs responsible for the black walnut’s current popularity on menus up and down the Northeast Corridor.
While the nuts, shelled and toasted or raw, may not be as snackable as the more common English varieties, they have a wide range of uses among Indigenous populations.
In Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer, a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, wrote, “The hickories, black walnuts, and butternuts of our northern homelands have their own specific names. But those trees, like the homelands, were lost to my people.”
Though Native Americans carried black walnuts and other related nuts with them as they were displaced, “The federal government’s Indian Removal policies wrenched many Native peoples from our homelands. It separated us from our traditional knowledge and lifeways, the bones of our ancestors, our sustaining plants,” Kimmerer writes.
Native peoples were divorced from their trees, and now, chefs, distillers, and foragers are trying to form new bridges with the same wild trees.
How to use black walnuts throughout the year:
Early spring to summer: Gather the leaves
“Use the leaves in early spring when they’re just the size of squirrel’s ears,” said Robert Gustafson, a Virginia-based specialist in wild foods. This is when they can be blended and fermented into sauces.
“Our entire goal is to find what grows well around us, and be receptive to working with it,” said Isaiah Billington, who along with Sarah Conezio, is the co-owner of Keepwell Vinegar and White Rose Miso, based in Dover.
“Our black walnut bay sauce is like a Worcestershire sauce with a base made from our own apple cider vinegar,” said Billington. The recipe was unearthed from a cookbook first published in 1879 and adapted by Langhorne. It’s aged for a year with ginger, garlic, horseradish, and black walnut leaves, which Billington harvests himself. The leaves give the sauce a mildly bitter, herbal flavor. Billington had become enamored with the sauce while working at the Dabney, which now purchases it from Keepwell instead of making it in house.
Early fall: Recognizably walnuts
“This is harvest season for storehouse wild foods,” said forager Heather McMonnies, who collects the nuts using an apple picker. “This is the same time you’d collect chestnuts or hickory nuts.”
Late fall: Clogging up people’s driveways
Gardeners and homeowners are annoyed by them as far north as Canada. Making use of them culinarily can keep tons of them out of landfills.
Winter: Cheers!
It’s time to crack open that black walnut nocino that started in the summer and drink it.
Late winter and early spring: Tap the trees
“My kids got tired of homemade maple syrup and well, I have black walnut trees, and we may as well tap them and see what we get,” said McMonnies. After boiling 40 gallons of sap, sweet and molasseslike in color, she produced one gallon of black walnut syrup, incredibly light in structure and composition, with a tinge of the nut’s signature funk.
Black walnuts are divisive, but so is Stilton cheese, durian, fermented tofu, and any number of delicious things. Does divisiveness make black walnuts any less distinguished?
