Preserving the (Green) Walnut Harvest

Clockwise, from left: aperitif aux noix (wine with green walnuts), green walnut liqueur, green walnuts in syrup. The nuts in the just-made drinks will soon blacken, and the honey at the bottom of the jar of liqueur will dissolve with some shaking or stirring. The walnuts in syrup are smaller than usual; I picked them a little too early last year.

Here in western Oregon, late June to mid-July is the time to pick green walnuts. You don’t need your own tree; just walk the country roads for a while and look up, into the great green canopy of an old tree that somehow survived the destruction, by storm or bulldozer, of a once-lucrative orchard, or shaded a farmhouse long since crumbled or burned. If you’re unsure the tree is a walnut—English, not black—kick the dirt at your feet, and uncover an old half shell or a whole nut, speckled with mold. Scan the branches for bright-green fruits, oval and no more than two inches long. If the tree is at the edge of a grass or grain field, with no occupied house nearby, the farmer is almost surely absentee. He would be happy to have you take some nuts, and probably the rest of the tree with them. Fill your pockets. Promise the tree you’ll be back come fall, to pick mature nuts off the ground.

Hold a nut to your nose as you walk, to inhale the delicious resinous aroma—a cross, to my nose, between lime and eucalyptus. Too bad a green walnut isn’t edible, not in its natural state. But you can make it so, provided the nut hasn’t yet developed a hard shell. To be sure you’ve harvested in time, pierce one of the nuts with a needle when you get home. You should be able too easily push the needle to the center.

Before eating the nuts, you’ll want to soak out their bitterness in multiple changes of water. Then you can either pickle them or preserve them in syrup. Pickled walnuts are, for me, interesting at best, but I love the spicy, syrupy, chewy preserves, especially for the way the peeled green fruits take on the brain-like shape of mature, hulled walnuts. The Joy of Pickling includes a recipe for pickled walnuts, and The Joy of Jams, Jellies, and Other Sweet Preserves has one for green walnut preserves.

You don’t need to soak your walnuts if you plan to drink them—that is, to drink in their bitter taste and perfume in an alcoholic beverage. You need only about two dozen green walnuts to make a liter of green walnut liqueur. Called liqueur de noix by the French, licor de nueces verdes by Spaniards, orahovac by Croats, and, most famously, nocino or nocillo by Italians, the liqueur is made by simply steeping fresh, unhusked green walnuts with a few other flavorings in alcohol.

My recipe is much like most others, except that I’ve used honey in place of the usual refined sugar. Occasional additions are vanilla beans (perhaps to imitate the effect of aging in oak, which is sometimes done for commercial walnut liqueurs), orange peel, and walnut leaves. The alcohol can be in the form of Everclear, brandy, marc, or eau de vie instead of vodka.

Green Walnut Liqueur

1 pound green walnuts (about 24)
1 3-inch cinnamon stick
6 cloves
Zest of 1 lemon, in strips
1½ cups honey
1 liter vodka 

Wearing gloves so your hands don’t blacken, crack each walnut by smacking it with the side of a heavy knife or cleaver. Don’t worry if some of the nuts break into pieces. Put the nuts into a 2-quart jar along with the cinnamon, cloves, and lemon zest, and pour the honey over. Add the vodka, close the jar tightly, and shake it briefly. Wash your cutting board immediately so the walnut juice doesn’t blacken it.

Every day, shake the jar or stir its contents. This will not only help the honey to dissolve but also turn the nuts so that contact with air will eventually blacken them all over. When this happens, you can put the jar in a cupboard. The liquid will turn black, and the walnuts will sink to the bottom.

At least two months after mixing the ingredients, filter the liquid through muslin (last year I took three and a half months to get around to this, but no matter). The liqueur will be as black as strong coffee, with a slight greenish tinge. Funnel the liqueur into bottles, close them tightly, and store them in a dark place as long as you like. Many people say that green walnut liqueur is best after a year’s aging.

“It tastes like Christmas,” two of my children told me, on separate occasions, upon first tasting green walnut liqueur. Have the liqueur in winter as an aperitif or nightcap, perhaps with milk or cream, or dilute it with white wine for a warm-weather drink.

The French often add wine at the start. The following recipe comes from my daughter’s friend Tanya, who teaches at a professional school for cooks in Brittany.

Tanya’s recipe calls for the equivalent of three bottles plus about a cup of white wine. You might round off the amount to three bottles. Again, you might use another sort of liquor, such as brandy or vodka, rather than eau de vie in the narrow sense of alcool blanc.

Aperitif aux Noix

20 green walnuts
2½ liters dry white wine
½ liter eau de vie
2/3 cup sugar
1 cinnamon stick

In a gallon jar, combine all the ingredients. Stir, and close the jar tightly. Let it sit for two months, stirring from time to time.

Filter the liquid, taste it, and add a little sugar, if you like. Funnel the liquid into bottles, and close them securely. “Conservation excellente,” says Tanya.

22 thoughts on “Preserving the (Green) Walnut Harvest”

  1. I wish I’d seen this last year after Irene. Can you do this with hickory nuts? We lost a lot of those in the storm.

  2. I don’t think we get walnuts in TX. My parents had a black walnut tree in their yard, and I used to love the smell of the green nuts. If I ever come across some down here, I will definitely try these recipes!

  3. Amazing! How I miss nocino after meals. It is considered a ‘digestive’ in Sicily. We used it in the sauce for Walnut cake,also. Thanks for the wonderful reminder. Brought back so many wonderful memories. Not many green walnut trees here in NW WA.

  4. Thank goodness you reminded me! I make a “Walnut Wine” from Madeline Kamman using green chartreuse and red wine plus other seasonings. It is a good to finish for pan sauces as well.

  5. Thanks, Pat. I don’t want to violate Madeleine’s copyright, but I want to let readers of this blog know where to find her recipe. For anyone interested, “In Madeleine’s Kitchen” is in print and available from Amazon.

  6. “If you’re not sure the tree is a walnut—English, not black—kick the dirt at your feet, and uncover an old half shell or a whole nut, speckled with mold”

    Does this mean to use English walnuts, and NOT black walnuts?

  7. I made Nocino a couple of years ago from a recipe I found in the “Oregonian” (Vern Nelson’s column maybe?) using a nice dry red wine from Sonoma. It was and still is incredible, and does indeed “taste like Christmas”!

    1. Yes, my husband makes walnut oil, with a press that he designed to make hazelnut oil. Much pressure is needed; his first nut press was a 50-ton hydraulic shop press for which he had special parts fabricated. He likes to toast the walnuts before pressing them to bring out their flavor.

      1. Hi Linda. Thankyou for replying to my question. I gather the walnuts should be collected in June. I have some trees in the garden of a cottage I am renoveting in Romania and would like to make useof the nuts. I have seen that a small press is available on the Internet.
        Do they need to be boiled and then roasted or toasted?

  8. For oil, Rosie, the nuts should be collected when they fall, in autumn. Then you crack them and separate the meats from the shells, but you don’t need to boil the meats. Roasting is easiest in an oven. For a milder flavor (and perhaps a more nutritious and long-keeping oil), you skip the roasting. Here are a couple of French websites with descriptions of the commercial production of walnut oil: http://www.huilerielepine.com/ and http://www.huilerie-richard.com/la-production-de-huile-de-noix/.

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