Shelling Pecans after a Three Year Draught

For whatever reason, nutrition I'm guessing, our trees haven't made pecans in three years.  This year, however, they made up for lost time.  As discussed in previous posts, we picked up six five gallon buckets of pecans.  We could have picked up more, but realized we had enough.  We decided that we needed to get started cracking and shelling them.  Five years or so, I'd crack them all myself using an old timey cracker.  In recent years, we've taken them to a place in Breaux Bridge, Louisiana that cracks them or to our local feed store.

Don't you love going into old feed stores or hardware stores?  It's like walking back in time.  There's a screen door to enter.  The merchants are always friendly and talk to you about the weather and other happenings.  You can pick up feed, or medicine, halters, buckets, boots, seed, seed potatoes and Farmer's Almanacs.  They load the feed in the back of you truck for you.  Old feed stores are the best!

Our local feed store also has a pecan cracking machine.  It is an odd looking contraption.  When you walk in, you can hear the "pop, pop, pop" of pecans being cracked.  You pour your buckets of pecans in the hopper and they go through the machine.

The cracked pecan drops out of the chute below and back into the bucket that you brought them in.

Then, the shopkeeper puts them on a scale and weighs them.  This year's charge for cracking them is $0.33 per pound.  That might sound like a lot; however, it saves you a lot of time!

Once we get them home, I grab several handfuls of cracked pecans and put them in a box.  I shell them over the box so that all the shells and dust don't get all over the place.  I use a special tool to clean the shell out from the ridges in the pecan.  If you don't get that piece of shell out and you eat it, it will instantly make your mouth very dry.  It's not very appealing.  If you deal with home-grown pecans and are a pecan-eater, you know what I'm talking about.  Anyway, here's what they look like right out of the machine.  As you can tell, the machine has done most of the work for you.  All you need to do is remove the cracked shells and sort out any bad ones.  Most of them even come out whole and not broken.

In three shakes of a billy goat's tail, you have a pot-full of shelled pecans.  Nice ones, too!

So far, we've shelled two of the 6 five gallon buckets and have put FIVE one gallon zip lock bags of fresh pecans in the deep freeze.  By the time we've finished the other 4 buckets, we'll have quite an inventory of pecans.  Pecans freeze well, and it is a good thing.  You never know, we may have another 3 year spell where we don't get any.  It'll be good to have some squirreled away.

Before we go further, let me tell you about our pecans.  It is hard to get perspective from the photos.  Our pecans are a 'wild' variety, I think.  They are small and a little difficult to crack manually.  But what they sacrifice in size, they make up for it in taste.  They are rich.  Full of pecan oil.  If you cut them up, your fingers feel kind of oily.

For comparison, the photo below shows on the left, a pecan from a local Pecan Company that has orchards.  Our pecan is on the right.  Quite a difference, huh?

But that's okay.  We like our pecans and look forward to once again, having pecans grown in the yard to eat.