Pickle my Walnut! (Pickled Walnuts)

Member Name: Bilbo Baggins

Product:	Pickled Walnuts
Date:	27/04/01 (858 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Addictive.

Disadvantages: Not for the faint hearted.

Why don’t they break your teeth and leave you agony? Because the Walnuts are picked before they develop their notoriously hard shell. I once heard that it was the vinegar that softened the shell during the pickling process but I think you’d agree that a vinegar with stronger softening properties than Lenor Comfort Plus would be needed.

It’s simply not true. Put the ghosts to rest (those people that have tried pickling Walnuts with hard shells, lost and now float in another vortex), the shells are not hard at the start of production. Anyway, NASA have been known to use the shells to cover rocket parts that are exposed to high temperatures so the stuff must be hard to soften.

So which strange people learnt the art which would be such a future hit in the Baggins hobbit hole? The English of course, those ancient fellas that once lived on our colourful rainy island. Recipes have been passed down from generation to generation and fossils and writings have been found to corroborate the existence of the Walnut tree during the earliest ages.

Pickling walnuts is very labour intensive, and skill is required to pick them at exactly the right time. The walnuts should be as large as possible, but as mentioned the shell must not have had the chance to harden. The result is an earthy, acidic tasting delicacy that look like small brains. They don’t sound very appetising when described in such a way but believe me when you get them on a plate with a Ploughman’s lunch and dissect them lump by lump (with thinking about the film Hannibal) you’ll develop an unrelinquished love for them.

So what’s in the jar? The usual ingredients are malt vinegar, allspice bay leaf, celery seed, cloves, garlic, mace, mustard seed, and peppercorns which are normally stored in the jar for a couple of years to really infuse into the walnuts and create it’s distinctive flavour. You can only really tell what they ar
e when you cut into them because the skins look black and fairly smooth which is uncharacteristic of your run o the mill Walnut.

You can also throw pickled walnuts into many recipes. Or throw them at your mates. One recipe that I have not tried yet is ‘Beef With Pickled Walnuts’ which sounds really tasty (found on ichef.com). They are also nice with green olives.

You can buy them at Tesco or online (just do a pickled Walnut search).

So please join me in embracing the pickled Walnut. They look like brains.

Summary: