Beech nuts

[Amoeba]

I've been interested in trying beech nuts since I missed them last year. I'd heard you can't eat too many since they can cause tummy upsets in large quantities, so I only really wanted to try them for curiosity's sake. I'd heard mixed responses, some saying they taste good, others saying they taste bitter.

I found a few beech trees with fallen nuts. I looked for a fruiting body that looked ready, brown and split at the top. I picked out the two pyramidal papery nuts from inside and took them home. After confirming their identification from leaves and the 'fruit' (I'm not good at plant I.D. so I like to make sure) I tried one.

This was the strange part - it went against everything I'd heard about beech nuts as being fleshy and oily. These nuts seemed like nothing more than empty dry shells. The papery outside was all that was of the nut. The flesh inside was gone.

Since then, it's all I've ever found of beech nuts. Time and time again the nuts seem strangely empty. I dissected one and found the only thing it contained was a short hairy green 'string' (it's all I can describe it as) a little under a centimetre in length. The rest was just air.

Have I found the wrong plant? Or is this what beech nuts are supposed to be like? Or perhaps these plants haven't been able to properly develop nuts this year? They seemed ripe, as I said earlier the pods were brown and had split open.

[Beekeeper]

No, you seemed to have summed up those nuts nicely, i have never found much in them either and what there is seems tasteless to me.

BK

[RobSutton]

They don't form proper nuts every year. Beech have what is known as mast years when they produce thousands of ripe, fleshy and tasty nuts and then may not set any for anything up to five or ten years afterwards. It's been well over five years since we've had a mast year up here.

[Hobjob]

They used them as a coffee substitute in the war - my guess
it was a pretty poor substitute!!

[Peter W]

When they do form nuts there is no mistaking this. I have found the flavour of ripe ones to be really excellent. The only problem is it takes a lot of effort to get a reasonable mouthful!

[toolbox]

Hi
I have just collected a load of beech nuts- I must have been lucky because a large number of them are fairly fat... well, for a beech nut anyway! I was lucky enough to be under a beech tree whilst a squirel was knocking them of the branches.It was food falling from the skies! Anyway i am now on the hunt for recipies so i can add some flavour. back soon...

[toolbox]

xexexexexexe. no real recipies but i just dry roast in a pan and add to garlic and onion with a little spice will suffice...

[seokev]

Beechnuts are great, they taste quite a bit like hazelnuts I think. They're small, but it's fun to find them and eat them, especially if you have kids - and they're free!

If you're finding empty casings (just brown paper shells with nothing in them) then you're not looking hard enough ;-)
a tip for you - don't bother looking in the actual burr, the green/ yellow prickly casings, the best place to look is all over the floor under the tree, pick up the nuts which have fallen out of the casings - if you go to the trouble to open the burrs, or try to pull them out - most of the time these ones are empty.

The ones which are a complete nut, have a distinctive lighter shading towards the fat end - and these ones are more likely to fall out of the burr while in the tree or when the burr hits the ground, due to them being heavier.

Start off by just picking up all the nuts off the floor & squeeze them, the empty ones just crush, but when you get a full one you can't squash it, check out the colour of it against the empty ones, and you'll see the empty ones have all brown shells, and the full ones are lighter in colour near the fat end, almost like stretch marks in the shell. Once you get the knack of distinguishing the proper nuts from the empty casings, you'll find lots!

We have a number of beech trees near us, and we find some nuts under all of them, but certain trees seem to produce more than others.

If you spend enough time, depending on the size of the tree & the time of year etc, you can usually find quote a few. I take my kids picking them when we go out for bike rides, they snack on them during the ride - today in around 15 minutes we must have picked up around 50 - 100 nuts under one tree, and if we had the time to stay longer we could have found many more.

I've seen someone say they can cause upset stomach if too many are eaten - this is probably an old-wives tale ;-), the kind of things all mums say to their kids about anything, and it's probably true too - eat too many of anything and you can get an upset tummy, but to eat too many beechnuts I think you'd have to try hard, they're very small. I've eaten quite a few, and my kids eat as many as they possibly can ;-) and we've never experienced any problems as a result.

To eat, just peel off the hard shell to reveal the reddish brown nut. If you find them really hard to chew, then you're probably forgetting to peel off the shell ;-) I'm not talking about the green spiky casing / burr they grow in, but the actual hard exterior of the nut, remove this.

I find them quite tasty, some more so than others - they do have a bit of a hazelnut taste about them, they don't all taste exactly the same, which is one of the things I like about them. I've seen some say they taste bitter, I wouldn't say they were bitter, although I have had one or two slightly bitter ones.

According to nutrition websites, Beechnuts are a great source of thiamin, riboflavin and iron, and Monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fats provide more than 80% of the fat content so they're pretty healthy little nuts.

[Trevor Padget]

I have collected beechnuts for many years, at least in those years when my trees produce sufficient.
I sweep the mast off my drive and put the sweepings through a course sieve and a finer one. This effectively separates the mast from the other debris covering my drive.
Then comes the boring bit, peeling them, which I usually do in front of the tv.
Working with a large tray on my knee, with a small bowl of nuts and another one for the kernels, I use a sharp knife to split off one face of the nut and the kernel then falls out easily.
I shake the peeled nuts in a large flour sieve and blow away the small hairs which clump together.
I then grind the nuts in a hand grater to produce a coarse flour, which I then use to make macaroons (Google "Kransekake" for a suitable recipe),