Nutcracker

Zinc Nut Cracker Set

We had Thanksgiving dinner yesterday instead of Thursday due to the scheduling demands of the medical-industrial complex. Andy brought a bag of unshelled nuts. I can't remember the last time I had an unshelled nut. These days if we want nuts we buy them already shelled. Now I know why.

When I was a kid we had a nutcracker set like the one shown above. I think ours was steel. I can't imagine zinc ones would last too long, but maybe they don't have to as people will quickly abandon them. I don't have one of those, but I have a pair of Channellock pliers, so I set to work. Dang, these nuts are tough and if you aren't careful you won't just crack the shell but you will crush the contents as well. Cracking the shell is just the first part of the job. Now you get to separate the bits of meat from the remnants of the shell. A pick like the ones in the above set would have been useful here. After maybe half an hour I had maybe a quarter cup of meat, and most of that was tiny pieces the size of a BB.

So now I'm wondering how commercial nut farms get the job done. Do they ship their nuts over to slave labor camps where impoverished peasants spend all day cracking nuts for their cup of gruel? No, this is America where everything is done by machine.

All In One Pecan Nut Buster
chris dailey

Near as I can tell, these machines are adjusted to the size of the nut and the nuts are squeezed between two wheels that just the right distance apart. This cracks the shell without smashing the innards. Then a fan separates the wheat from the chaff.

I probably cracked a couple of dozen nuts and I think I only got one half of one walnut out intact. All the rest were busted. I think I got a little better in cracking technique as I went on, but a hard limit on the crushing would probably have helped.

The nutcracker set included six picks. Why so many? Because it took six times as long to pick the bits of meat out of the broken shell as it took to crack. You could have six people sitting around a table with a bowl of nuts. One person takes a nut and cracks and then hands the nutcracker to the next person. Now they set to work picking out the bits of meat. By the time they are done, the nutcracker has made its way around the table and you are ready to crack the next nut. Not an efficient way of getting things done, more like keeping your hands busy while you are jabbering with your fellows. Kind of like wrapping coins or knitting.

P.S. I'm surprised no one has come up with a better manual nutcracker. Or maybe I just haven't seen one. A better nutcracker would need two things, 1) an adjustable stop to easily limit the amount of crush, and 2) a sliding action to roll the nut in between the two jaws. The sliding jaws would need to move a couple of inches to ensure at least one complete revolution of the nut. You may want to go for two revolutions, just to cover the off cases at the beginning and end of a crushing rotation.