Macadamias - Storms Provide a Feast

Brisbane and its surrounding areas suffered some serious storms in the last month. Some areas were flooded but my local area only received a week of steady rainfall and strong winds.

But every cloud has a silver lining - and I discovered mine on Thursday.

Our macadamia nut tree in the front yard had been teasing me for weeks with big swags of nuts far out of reach. While doing some gardening I had jealously watched a sulfur crested cockatoo as he alighted on the branches and used his wicked sharp beak to feast on those in the highest branches.

On Thursday following the bad weather I noticed nuts had dropped to the ground. At first I thought it was just a handful but found more and more the longer I searched, scuffed amongst the grass and raked aside leaves and twigs. At the end of my foraging I had a small bucketful - I'd estimate maybe 80 - 90 nuts in total.

Saturday saw me hunched over my prize with a small hammer as I bashed and pried open the nuts. Then, with substantially less nuts intact than I would have hoped for (see notes below) I roasted them in the oven.

THINGS I HAVE LEARNED ABOUT MACADAMIAS

I was so excited at harvesting something from my yard that I went a bit gung-ho with getting the nuts to an edible/useable stage. In the process I learnt a few things about harvesting macadamias - unfortunately I learnt it the hard way!

splitting the nut: A normal hand-held nutcracker won't work on these perfectly rounded and very tough nuts. A hammer and a slab of something solid like concrete will do the trick. When I was a kid, we used my dad's wood-vice but opening and closing it for each nut takes a while.

I found the best technique was to place the nut with the line-groove facing upwards. Using a small, craft hammer, I gently hammered the nut until the groove became a crack. Then, turning the nut I continued to hammer along the axis that the crack had started. Don't hammer heavily as you want the nut to split open, not smash inwards.

If you do this properly, the nut should split neatly into two halves and you can withdraw the whole nut in one piece.

fact: When first harvested macadamias can be up to 30% water.

fact in action: When cracking open the nuts I found that most of them were impossibly hard to get out of the shells. Using my newfound hammering technique I found the shell split perfectly in half but so did the nut itself and the flesh of the nut was swollen to fill the shell and couldn't be wedged out, even with fingernails. This meant that many of my nuts were torn into little shreds by the time I was done. (You can see this in the photo below of the roasted nuts).

how to fix: Leave the nuts 3 or 4 weeks after harvesting. The nut shrinks a little as the water dries allowing them to stay whole as you split the shell and come out in one piece.

Roasting macadamias is easy and it smells fantastic: Roasting macadamia nuts in the oven is easy. I put them on a baking tray with a 2cm lip, ensuring they were evenly spread and no more than two nuts deep. I put them in a hot (220 degrees celcius) oven. I regularly stirred and tossed the nuts to try to get the roasting even. Apparently macadamias can burn easily so it's best to stay close by when roasting them. But don't worry - once you have the heavenly scent of roasting macadamias you won't want to go anywhere!