Pining for piñons

Back in early November I mentioned harvesting a few piñon cones while we were visiting friends in Nevada. My intention was to get out the nuts and see what I could do with them. First came the challenge of picking the cones without getting covered with sap. I mostly enveloped them in a paper bag and tried to get them off without touching them, and then I did manage to remove the sap that got on my fingers with nail polish remover and salad oil. Not very efficient, but then my harebrained projects seldom are.

A few of the nuts fell out in the bag, as the cones were really ripe, but I didn't have time to finish up the project on the road, so saved it "for later". Today, while I was cooking up some spiced pecans for the holidays, I remembered the project and figured I'd better get'er done. I looked up some "advice" on the Internet.... sheesh. 'Sorry, but as a librarian (by profession as well as temperament) I just have to correct some of what I found. More about that later.

Following what seemed to be the most reasonable advice I could find on the web I first heated the cones to get the sap to melt into the wood so I could handle the cones and so the nuts would fall out. The one short-coming of this approach is that I almost killed my dear husband, who has plant allergies. Other than that it worked OK, and the house smelled really nice! The nuts all fell out of the cones, the cones were shiny from the melted sap, and as soon as Steve could breath again I closed up all the doors and windows and went on to the next step. [Next time I'll try the alternative method and freeze the cones. The frozen sap falls out in chunks.] There's more info here if you are interested in experimenting on your own.

Next I toasted the nuts on a cookie sheet at 350 degrees for 15-20 minutes, then put them in a baggie and crunched them slightly with a rolling pin to crack the shells so I could peel them.  I had eaten a few fresh off the tree and the shells were so tender I hadn't noticed them, but as the nut ripens and dries they get pretty hard. After the nuts cooled I peeled the shells off. The amount of nuts in the bowl yielded less than 1/4 c. of finished nuts. . . . which leads me to think about how hard the Native Americans and pioneers had to work to get their food. If Americans today had to work that hard I doubt we'd have a problem being overweight! We'd also waste less food if we had to put this much effort in to getting it to the edible state.

Now about those corrections: First, piñon trees are pines, but not all pines are piñons (some folks spell it pinyon. There are about 115 species of pine, only eight species of true piñon, and a few others that some experts include in the group, so when I read on one site that "pine nuts with the shell on are piñon nuts" I got a little crazy. Pine nuts are pine nuts whether they have the shell on or not. Piñon nuts are piñon nuts, whether they have the shell on or not. Piñon nuts only come from piñon trees. I also read a suggestion to use a nutcracker to get into the shells - hummmm, they must have been working with much larger pine nuts, as I never met a nut cracker that would deal with something less than a quarter of an inch across. And to get to the important point, it is one heck of a lot of work to get the little devils out so you can eat them!

Pine nuts in general, including piñon nuts, were one of the most important foods for Native Americans in the Great Basin region. They traditionally heated the nuts over coals and then winnowed them through a series of baskets (which they had to weave), and then after the nuts were removed from their shells they toasted them over the fire again before grinding them into a flour. Talk about a long process! Considering the time and effort it took for me to get a quarter of a cup of useful nuts I probably would have starved to death in "the old days".

Nowadays we can trot down to the grocery store and buy a bag of pine nuts already prepared, but like baking your own bread or growing your own vegetables, harvesting and preparing wild foods is a life lesson like no other to teach us appreciation for the abundance we have.