Eating cheap

I was wandering through a Sunday market here in Cromwell – you probably know the type. Incredibly expensive cheeses. A coffee cart that’s inexplicably about 50% more than the coffee shop a stone’s throw away. Someone selling hand-knitted tea-cosies and polished gemstones. The odd stall proudly owning a “witchy” label selling incenses, stones, and herbal teas. Maybe some soap. Not the kind of place you’d expect to get cheap food.

Tucked away in the corner, however, someone was selling sack of walnuts – in shells – for $12/kg. I didn’t know quite what the ratio of edible walnut-to-walnut shell by weight a walnut is, nor did I consider looking it up (a lot of times in my life you could ask “what were you thinking?” and the response would be: “Uh. Nothing?”).

Lugging a kilo of unshelled walnuts home, I promptly put them in a cupboard and forgot about them until my existing supply of (shelled) walnuts ran out, which took about 3 weeks (longer than anticipated).

Van life on the cheap necessitates two things:

1. Not buying much stuff
2. Not having much stuff

As such, I don’t actually own a nutcracker. The best I had, or so I thought, was a rubber mallet that I use to hammer in pegs for the awning. Not particularly hygienic but so long as it only touches the shell – so what?

Well. Hygiene was the least of my worries; I spent a good five minutes picking bits of walnut, shell or otherwise, out of the rug. And so this time I changed tack…

A hand job

“Can you crack walnuts by hand?”

Yes. Yes you can. It requires a bit of technique – namely lining up the seam of the walnut shell with your palm, going sideways, then pressing hard. Judging the pressure is a bit of a knack and many walnuts turned into more of a walnut powder than a walnut piece, shell included in the mix. But, nonetheless, it did end up being more successful than the mallet.

Briefly. About 5 nuts in I discovered what you might call “a tough nut to crack”, which resulted in deep imprints in my palms and a fully intact walnut. Cue switching to the base of a mug to crack them open, which turns out to be much more controllable and less painful – although I was concerned about the structural integrity of the mug.

Ultimately I spent about 30 minutes in all cracking 198 g of walnuts, including picking out what I can only describe as “walnut piece dividers” that sit through the middle of the nut itself. What did I produce for this effort? 93 g of edible walnut.

Some was wasted during early efforts but ultimately most walnuts were cracked with ease and the nut generally intact – I’d estimate that a skilled cracker could get around 50% yield.

The final cost

What does this mean? It means that so long as you don’t count your own time cracking them (and it’s a perfectly pleasant activity if you’re watching TV) the cost of walnuts, bought whole and shelled, becomes around $24/kg. The cost in shops? The cheapest I’ve found is $26.60/kg but the typical price is more like $30/kg – $40/kg.

Accounting for taste

A bonus here is that I think that these walnuts are significantly tastier than the price equivalent or cheaper in the super market. No doubt this vendor is seasonal and won’t be around for much longer, but I shall definitely be returning. The overall nutty flavour was much more prevalent, with much less bitterness, and they didn’t dry my mouth out as much

Energy budgets

Nuts may not be the obvious choice for cheap eating, but they’re packed full of energy – a good reason they’re typically included in trail mix – and are incredibly versatile. Mix water and sugar to make a simple syrup and candy them. Blitz them to make a powder and use as a flour-like substitute (other ingredients also required). Plus, packing around 65 g of fat and 15 g of protein per 100 g of walnut, the energy density is around 700 kcal/100 g – which makes my hand-shelled walnuts good for around $290 kcal/$ – that’s 67% higher than the pie in my previous post.

Plus they pack in around 6 g of fibre/100 g, as well as Omega-3 and Omega-6 fats. Hand shelled (in season) walnuts. Pretty much the cheapest healthy snack you can have.