Last time I wrote about homesteading... I talked about making Hickory Nut Milk. It was an interesting post with links to recipes, history, and nutritional information I had gotten from the web. The post itself is a bit short, and if you want to dive deeper into the rabbit hole of wild foods, there is within the links of my research a lot of really good content, you should have a look.
Today I want to walk you through how I actually made the milk, step by step.
Foraging and Harvesting
This is what the nut looks like. Get yourself familiar with finding the right hickory tree to harvest from, as some of them aren't very tasty at all, full of tannins, and just outright degusting... I don't want you to get turned off this wonderful source of food.
Shag bark Hickory is what found, and I harvested a few pounds from an area close to home.
When if falls off the trees naturally in October and November the nut will be ready to eat (you can eat it raw right there and then). I typically take the outer shell, that thick dark skin, off as I gather the nut into a basket or a bag. You will know if it's ripe if that shell easily falls off with a push of the finger.
Processing Hickory Nut
I know, I know, processing sounds like a bad thing, but that is the technical term to use when you turn any food into something you can eat.
Once I have enough nuts gathered, I take a hammer, a piece of wood, and an old clean rag (something I don't mind getting dirty).
I place the rag over the nut so that when I hit it with the hammer small pieces don't go flying everywhere. I also hold the rag down to contain everything in it.
By hitting it a few times, you can get much smaller pieces than you see in this picture. What I want do next time is use a large Mortar and pestle. Perhaps one that has some good depth to it so to limit the loss of flying deliciousness!!!
You can see how the meat looks like a walnut or a pecan... while doing this I had to stop myself from eating to many, I wanted to keep enough to make the milk!
I put the pieces of meat and husk all together (it should have been ground into much finer pieces), and covered it with water about a finger above the bulk of the crushed nuts. I let it boil about 30 minutes.
As it boiled down I stirred, and added more water. Once it boiled down again I passed the stock through a fine mesh sieve, into a bowl. It tasted quite nice!!! Then, I added new water, and repeated the process three times.
The end product was a bit more diluted than the first boil, but it was still very delicious. Give or take about thirty nuts made about a pint of hickory nut milk, in this way. It tasted (passed tense here because it went pretty fast) slightly like pecan with a hint of sweet maple syrup, the smell however was strong, sweet and very reminiscent of real maple syrup.
There was a lot of oil floating at the top of the mason jar I stored it in. When it was time to use it, I'd shake the jar vigorously and pour it into my hot beverage and drink me a cup full on wild and local nutrition!
Let me know if you've made hickory work for you and if you'd like to see more wild food posts!
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