The cost of a walnut, both in shell and peeled, can vary greatly from seller to seller. This is not someone's whim, but the realities of the market.
Many factors affect the price of a walnut:
- walnut fresh or last year
- combative or greedy
- wet, dry or too dry
- with a clean shell or with spots and darkening
- the core is light or dark
When choosing a nut, it is necessary to clearly understand the purpose of processing - this is to obtain a whole kernel or to obtain crumbs in large volumes.
To get a "butterfly" it is important to choose a moderately dry walnut. You can buy a fresh walnut, but processing such a walnut will require manual labor. Many large enterprises buy fresh, still wet nuts and dry them themselves - naturally or in dryers. Thus, enterprises start processing the nuts as early as possible and are confident in its quality - that it is evenly dried, without mold and not overdried.
When working on volumes, and not on obtaining a whole kernel, it is permissible to purchase both live and greedy nuts. The main criterion when buying a nut is that it should be free of signs of spoilage, damage, mold, pests, as well as without extraneous taste and smell. To split the walnut into a small fraction immediately after the nut cracker, a docker is used.
* Greedy - a walnut with a thick shell and partitions ingrown into the kernel.
It is almost impossible to extract a whole core (“butterfly”) from it due to its specific structure.
Another important criterion is the color of the kernel - the lighter the core, the more expensive it can be sold. Accordingly, a light butterfly (1/2, half) has the highest value, and a dark crumb has the lowest.
When purchasing a walnut, you need to pay attention to appearance - a nut with a clean, light-colored shell is more likely to have a light-colored core. If the shell is dark, then the nut was not cleaned of the green pericarp for a long time and the coloring matter was absorbed into the shell and even the kernel.
A shell with spots and damage should also alert, as the nut may not have been stored properly, which leads to bitterness, mold, microorganism damage, or simply darkening of the kernel.
Distinguishing the appearance of a greedy and a nut is a difficult task. You can check this only by cracking a nut. Therefore, with each purchase, it is desirable to conduct a sample - to remove the nut from different parts of the bag and split it.