Awww, NUTS!

This month's crafty adventure centers on nuts, but I'll bet you've not had these nut before. Today we are going to figure out if we can roast and eat a wild food: beechnuts!

The American Beech (Fagus grandifolia) produces small nuts inside of a scaly covering. These scaly nut clusters drop off in Autumn and it just so happens that one of the trails I walk was full of them! Most of the time, the nuts drop out of the scales on impact with the ground, but sometimes the two remain intact. What you see here is the scale cluster surrounding the nut shell. Under the scales and then under the shell is the edible golden nut.

It took me about and hour to collect as many as you see here. I didn't weigh them before roasting because I didn't really care how much the shells weighed. Once I got them home, I used a little quality control to remove any nuts that had cracks or tiny holes in their shells. This was a sure sign of insects boring inside to the nut meat.

Since I couldn't find a recipe on roasting beechnuts, I used a peanut roasting recipe as my basis. Given that the beechnuts are much smaller than peanuts, I used the lowest temperature of all the recipes and shortened my roasting time by a little. My goal was to roast them long enough that the papery membrane between the nut shell and the nut meat would turn brittle and rub away like it does on a peanut. I also hoped that the shell itself would get a little more brittle because cracking a raw beechnut was like trying to crush granite pebbles. I ended up roasting the nuts at 325 degrees F for 20 minutes. A couple of them popped as they baked, but mostly all was quiet. The smell of them roasting was something similar to roasted hazelnuts or hickory.

When they had cooled, I tried cracking a few open. Most had nothing inside them at all! Only the very biggest nuts had any real nut inside the shell and those were very small -- about the size of a shelled sunflower seed. The 20 minutes of roasting turned them medium brown and brittle, rather than golden brown. The outer shell was so hard that I ended up using a pair of standard pliers to squeeze them open. No matter how careful I was, I could not prevent myself from pulverizing the tiny roasted nut inside.  Its possible that with a lighter roast and more care, I could produce enough nuts to make a mouthful, but overall, the yield was not worth the rather involved effort.

So, is this crafty adventure a total wash? Nope!

The nuts went back into the oven at 400 degrees F for an additional 15 minutes to really dry them out. After 5 minutes, they all started to pop! So I took them out, cooled them slightly, and started them drying again, but this time at 250 degrees F for 30 minutes. My goal wasn't to eat them but to make them decorative. They had just changed function. My first thought was that they would be great as a natural bead, because I have a prayer cord project on my slate, but they are too brittle to pierce with a needle; they break all apart. It's possible that they will work as beads if I drill tiny holes in them with my Dremel. I will test that and get back to you. But for now, pushing a needle through them makes them fall apart.

Another use could be inside a shaker; I have a gourd that is soon to be a shamanic rattle and it could use some noisy material inside. I will let you know how I use them, but rest assured that they will have a great finish.