Monkey-Puzzle Nuts

I was in the produce section of the supermarket one day and noticed a shelf full of plastic-wrap sealed packets filled with some sort of nut within their shells. Piñon was the only designated name printed on the label and piñon is Spanish for pine nut. However, these didn’t look like any pine nut I have seen before. I thought to myself: those are just too large to contain those little white, somewhat translucent nuts I’ve seen in the spice section of many supermarkets in my life. Hmmmph, maybe I should ask my wife before messing with something I have no clue about, I decided. Must be something local. Well, turns out she didn’t know either. Why didn’t I just hop online to search, you ask? Well, I just didn’t think about it at the time. I consider myself a curious person regarding newly encountered foods, but in this case I don’t know. It looked like some sort of nut, and although I like pecans, walnuts, almonds, etc, they are not something I immediately jump upon when encountering anything new of the sort.

So a few days passed and then one day my wife came home from work to say that the cleaning lady brought a bunch of those piñones I had asked about the other day. Well I guess she wasn’t as curious as me because the only information I was able to pull out of her was that the lady just said to boil them for about ten minutes, peel, and eat. “Oh, they tasted good too!”, my wife said.

Later on, I decided to purchase a pack at the supermarket and give ‘em a try.

Into the hot water they went. Instead of cooling with cold water I decided just to let them sit and cool on their own. Peeling wasn’t too difficult but if I really wanted to peel a large quantity it would take some time. I found the easiest way was to rip the pointed end and just kind of squeeze the nut out. The nuts are quite large, just a tad bit smaller than the shell. They have a creamy translucent appearance and the flesh is firm yet somewhat flexible. Now for the taste. I don’t eat chestnuts that often, maybe once or twice a year when I can find them. Also, I find that I can only eat a few chestnuts at each sitting. For some reason after a few I find myself lacking the hunger for more. These nuts, I feel or maybe my tastes are messed up, are quite similar to chestnuts. The texture is somewhat the same but not entirely. These nuts are much firmer but somehow have the same feeling of “density” when you chew them around. If that makes any sense, but probably not.

Now I was curious. Maybe these can be used as a substitute for common pine nuts, which I can never find where I’m at, or chestnuts, or many other kinds of nuts that can be softened a bit. Since these were labeled piñon, I thought I’d search around. Well I’ll spare you the minor details for this part but in the end I wound up at Wikipedia. They always cross-link articles and such so maybe I could find something there. This is what I found on the page for pine nuts

The large edible seeds of species of the Southern Hemisphere conifer genus Araucaria, notably the Monkey-puzzle (A. araucana) of Chile and the Bunya-bunya (A. bidwillii) of Australia, are also often called pine nuts.

Large…Southern Hemisphere….pine nuts. That must be it! Clicked on the Monkey-Puzzle link but no image of nuts. Alright, quick image search on Google. BINGO!

So there you have it, the Araucaria araucana, or better known as Monkey-puzzle, nut.

The origin of the popular English name Monkey-puzzle derives from its early cultivation in Britain in about 1850, when the species was still very rare in gardens and not widely known. The proud owner of a young specimen at Pencarrow garden near Bodmin in Cornwall was showing it to a group of friends, and one made the remark “It would puzzle a monkey to climb that”;

Found this good article too. Maybe I’ll plant a few and wait ten years for little seedlings. Right!

Recipe experiment….to be continued….