Why pine nuts are expensive [video] | Hacker News Reader

Why pine nuts are expensive [video]

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Once I developed pine mouth (https://www.foodauthority.nsw.gov.au/about-us/science/food-r...). It was was one of the weirdest experiences I've ever had; I thought I had stumbled on some strange genetic metabolic disorder that was starting to manifest before I eventually figured out what it was. Basically, everything with carbohydrates started tasting super metallic and bitter, a little like soap or something, and it lasted for days.

At first I thought it was all pine nuts. Eventually, after being in a study, and with more attention and study of it, people figured out it's linked to certain reactions some people have to certain species of pine trees in Asia.

So then I started becoming picky about where the pine nuts come from, and discovered the US was a major producer of pine nuts up through WWII. I started buying pine nuts from local producers, from which I learned a fair amount about them, that there's different varieties of different size and oil content, with different taste profiles, oil content, and shelf-life.

I love pine nuts and am happy in theory to buy them from whereever, but it did open my eyes a bit to possibilities that aren't really being realized. It seems like the US market is drying up due to lack of demand and/or competition, but it would be interesting to see local producers thrive, with an emphasize on varietal quality, sort of like apples etc.

I got called out by the chef at the restaurant I was working at.

"It's so weird, my mouth just tastes metallic all the time no matter what I eat."

"Been stealing pine nuts from the line?"

"Yup."

Pine mouth and Chinese/Asia-sourced vs. Italian/Mediterranean-sourced pine nuts.

https://www.britbuyer.co.uk/chinese-vs-italian-pine-nuts/

Also Australia's NSW Food Authority's post about pine mouth:

https://www.foodauthority.nsw.gov.au/about-us/science/food-r...

This seems like a good way to reinforce a keto diet. If these pine nuts don't have any other side effect besides makings carbs taste bad this looks like a new health supplement idea!

People in this thread report the effect with things other than carbs, "even water tasted bitter".

Gymnemic acid could be an option, since it effectively turns off the sweet taste buds.

When I found pine nuts for only $16/lb at Trader Joe's, I thought I'd hit the jackpot. I made pesto, and even snacked on the pine nuts while I cooked.

Then I had a terrible, 2-week long experience with 'pine mouth'.

Everything tasted awful: coffee, muffins, cereal, meat, vegetables – even water tasted bitter. And during the first few days, before I realized what was happening, I threw away tons of perfectly safe food that I thought had spoiled.

I never found out how common pine mouth was, but I was really upset that the risk wasn't better communicated.

I looked at the TJs pine nuts just a couple of days ago, and maybe this has been recently added, but there is a clear pine mouth warning on the bag.

Ditto. Mine was most noticeable with the taste coffee. I probably cleaned/rinsed the coffee machine three or four times in an effort to improve what was otherwise something I couldn't control.

After about a week of playing Dr. Google finally discovered pine mouth and realizing the home made pesto from last week had pine nuts in it.

Coffee frequently reveals anosmia/parosmia/the end of either. Doesn't surprise me that it would have a similar interaction with pinemouth. It's a strong flavor, early in the day, every day. Since I learned anosmia is common with covid I've paid extra attention to how my morning caffeine tastes.

Oh this is interesting -- since having Covid in January, coffee is one of the things that still smells the most off to me.

Some people say fluvoxamine will fix that. (I have no personal experience.) It is at least safe to try. Please report results, if you do.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8094534/

Smell training might help: https://abscent.org/learn-us/smell-training

Some people could be craving coffee because of iron deficiency yet coffee contains natural compounds called tannins that can prevent your body from absorbing iron.

I had the same thing happen about 10 years ago after buying a bag of pine nuts and eating them all in 3 hours. The strange metallic taste from everything had me worried until I read about it on the internet. It lasted about 3 days and went away. I still eat pine nuts in pesto and probably some other sauces but I never eat a lot by eating them directly from a bag.

>> Once I developed pine mouth

This is HN. I though you developed an app called "pine mouth"

And the Pinenut is also a product.

https://www.pine64.org/pinenut/

Same journey here. I thought I was developing a neurological [edit: problem] or something.

It was unpleasant enough that I often substitute walnuts.

I refuse to see "neurological" made into a noun; not on my watch! But don't feel bad; "adjective" was originally an adjective as well.

Edited to save your neurologicals.

The fact that your username is germinalphrase makes this exchange so much better.

Eponysterical.

Thanks. You did me a solid.

I see what you did there.

I saw your do.

I had pine mouth about 20 years ago. I switched over to using walnuts in my pesto after that. But something in that video got me wondering: The guy talks about how they let the cones ferment for a couple of weeks before they extract the nuts - but then later on says something about not letting them ferment too long. I wonder if this is an Asian method of processing the cones that isn't done in other areas of the world and if the fermentation goes on too long will the nuts be effected and give one pine mouth?

Oh wow, I think I ran into this once as well. It was such a strange experience. In my case my Shinramyun instant noodles started tasting metallic and soapy for a few days. I thought there was soap on the cutlery or something and couldn't work it out.

I'm so glad you mentioned this as it explains a lot.

On-topic, pine cones are really interesting! They are the female reproductive organs of the tree. The male cones produce pollen, which gets captured by the female cone and fertilized into seeds (pine nuts). The scales on the female cone open up slightly for pollination, remain closed for fertilization, then open up again once the seed is fully formed and ready to be released.

Off-topic, but I'm in a meeting so I watched the video with the "Automated Captions" turned on. I didn't realize that the captions will actually overlay on top of the subtitles when Chinese is being spoken--it results in some, eh, interesting sentences:

"Dr. She, the one you need to do that kitchen."

"Long time. Your cakehole, who is Jonathan Joseph?"

Tolo News, out of Kabul, reports that there's a glut of pine nuts in Afghanistan, but no way of getting them out of the country.[1] Opportunity there for someone.

[1] https://tolonews.com/index.php/business-175138

Most of "Chinese" pine nuts these days are from Afghanistan/Pakistan, only shipped to China for packaging.

You can easily distinguish them. Long ones are from Afghanistan, short from China, Norko, Russia

https://pinenutsyndrome.wordpress.com/pine-nut-species

Interestingly I've never seen type A sold in China and I've sure eaten my fair share of pine nuts. Seems like these are mostly exported to other countries then? Would be hilarious if the bad ones are sold off to foreigners.

> Would be hilarious if the bad ones are sold off to foreigners.

It is hilarious that it is often the case in the industry. Most Chinese don't believe that's the case.

Yeah, based on personal anecdotes I suspect this as well. Never seen hard evidence for it though, I'm really curious if anyone's ever studied this.

Afghanistan resumes export of pine nuts to China: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0BkbrHCEBU

they should just mix-in some poppy into it and it will magically find its way out of the country :) Seriously though i wonder whether any interaction with Taliban - they are government there, so say paying any custom fee, etc. would thus become a material interaction with an officially designated terrorist group - would make one a criminal in the most of the world.

>* Harvesting pine nuts is extremely dangerous, and labor is expensive.

30+ years ago working summer construction jobs in Siberia we'd go into the forest to gather the nuts - i mean you'd climb up the pine tree to the very very top where most of the pines cones are, and the top of the pine is swaying in the wind, and there is around you like a beautiful sea of the pine tops moving like a kind of sea waves.

Locals though would just get a chainsaw and fall the pine trees and gather the pine cones that way.

Well sure the US should relax it's sanctions and at least allow them to sell their goods

Here in the mountain areas of California, we actually have quite a few wild and domesticated-gone-wild nut and fruit trees around.

There's the gray, one of the few pines who's nuts are edible, there's black walnut and ordinary walnut and the Chestnut as well as wild/feral plums, apples and pears. I have found just one unopened, fallen gray-pine cone so far and extracting the nuts is labor intensive indeed (to get the nuts, put pine cones in a burlap bag and hit is against a wall many time but then you have a bunch of nuts that require considerable cracking ).

Black walnut meat is very tasty (more like pine nuts than standard walnuts imo). And the tree spew out a whole lot of nuts. The only problem? The meat seems to be exactly as hard as the shells and the shells don't seem to every naturally open. Perhaps if you smash the things and used some centrifuge you could usable meat in quantity. Chestnuts are easy though, I collect enough for a modest snack each time I go through town lately.

Wild food is cool but there's a reason human domesticate and breed plants.

My grandmother had black walnut trees.

She used to collect the green walnuts and put them on trays to dry out: The "trays" were wood frames with small chicken wire bottoms (sturdy plus air flow). They seemed large, but I was a child. And then, she'd wait until they dry out.

When the fruit dries out, it is much easier to remove. It gets brittle and comes off. It will, however, stain everything dark. Wear gloves (they used leather), wear old clothes, and it might help to be outside. She generally got help with this.

Underneath, there was just the regular walnut shell, and it can be opened with nutcracker tools.

Sidenote: As a child, I hated these walnuts because I thought they were yucky. It actually made me swear off walnuts completely for some years because I didn't realize they were a different variety.

This information on black walnut is harmful. The fruits contain a toxic substance called jugalone which cannot be consumed. Every notice a black walnut tree and notice how there are no other plants in a circle around the trunk? That’s because of the jugalone.

Have you consumed any without any side effects because that’s interesting considering the number of black walnut trees I have on my property.

EDIT: I’m finding conflicting information online so I’m not sure. Apparently jugalone is poisonous to humans but I’m also seeing lots of black walnut recipes.

Do you have any references for this?

Black Walnut produce more jugalone than other walnuts but "Most members of the Walnut family (Juglandaceae) produce a chemical called "juglone" (5 hydroxy-alphanapthoquinone) which occurs naturally in all parts of these plants." [1]

I have no reference to juglone as being toxic humans despite many references to its toxicity to other plants.

I personally haven't consumed much 'cause they're a hassle to prepare but other comment to my post was from a person who with no apparent effects. And I've eaten lots of commercial walnuts, which supposedly also contain jugalone

And, there's toxicity to horses from juglone and to dog something else from but nothing related to humans mentioned here or anywhere I can find.

http://www.omafra.gov.on.ca/english/crops/facts/info_walnut_...

You're saying it's best to avoid a gathering of the jugalone?

Juglone is toxic to most plant species but AFAIK it is harmless to mammals.

Horses get sick a lot from eating black walnuts.

The husk on the outside of the walnut contains most of the jugalone. That's the green-to-black part on the outside of the fruit. If you've bought whole walnuts (dry, brown, wrinkly), but never seen them in the wild, you've never seen this part.

The horses and pigs get sick because they only eat the husk, they can't crack the shell to get at the nutritious part.

The meat inside of the shell is safe.

Reference:

https://extension.illinois.edu/blogs/extensions-greatest-hit...

I grew up in New Mexico eating (unshelled) and occasionally collecting piñon seeds (pine nuts) though I didn’t realize they were all the same until much later because the taste was so different. You can still buy the unshelled version without paying too much, but it is a lot of work to break the shells.

Have any good tips for cracking? I have some local pine trees with large, tasty nuts. But it is such a hassle to separate the nut's meat from the shell.

Right now I am just using a hammer and the cement pavement to break the thick shells individually without smooshing the meat. I have heard of a technique where you do not care about smooshing the meat, you just crush the whole nut, shell and all, and place all the nuts in liquid. The shells supposedly float while the meat sinks. I have never tried that though.

I am open to any suggestions to make my foraging more efficient.

That sort of depends - it is fairly traditional to roast in-shell (which makes the shell more brittle) and use rocks/hammer/teeth.

This guy has a de-sheller/crusher, if you want to see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S_Si67R1BjY

I would probably try to sort/bin by size (shake through progressively larger holes/screens, might need to fabricate something), then run it through the crusher, then again screen

To expand a bit more, probably dual steel plates with fixed spacers (based on bin size) in a hydraulic press would be best. Roasting/dehydrating/waiting makes the shells brittle and would make that process easier probably.

My experience is you need to find the right amount of force in order to crack the shell without smashing it.

As a child I found that the right tool helped: too big a rock and everything is smashed, too small and it's not cracked at all, but you can find the right one that nicely crack the shell by taping it on the nut.

yes - we had a specific hammer that worked pretty reliably where the potential energy from a light swing was close to perfect. You could use the hammer end of a splitting wedge too, but you had to be a bit lighter on the touch. Of course, the smaller nuts were always harder to crack.

My grandfather would crack walnuts in a large vise. It's not the right tool but it gives you much finer control and reproducibility than a hammer.

I learned from the local Nde how to gather, (traditionally a female activity while the males hunted) and what they do is do a light cracking of many nuts at once on a mill stone usually after toasting, more in a long pull across the surface than a smash, then toss the pile around letting the wind or manual blowing to get rid of the husks. Of course in hurry just use your teeth.

Similar situation here. When I was younger, there was plenty of these specific pine trees close to a local cinema (back in France). We wouldn't go often, but before / after the movie we would pick the shelled nuts off the ground and crack them open. I got surprised to see how expensive these are the first time I found them in a shop given that, as kids, we would just pick these off the ground.

Just a little aside. Your comment confused me a bit because ‘shelled’ in this context means the shells have already been removed from the nuts not that they are things in thier shells. As in ‘I’m shelling these nuts, but I’ve shelled those ones already’. It can also be used in the other sense, but usually only when describing the properties of the shell e.g ‘a hard-shelled crab’. Apologies in advance if you didn’t want the pedantic nut police!

Same here! My family and I would pick some from the forest floors where we could. Very tricky to find.

I have a side dish recipe I love for cooking pearl couscous that uses pine nuts toasted in butter. The last time I made it, I bought too more pine nuts than I needed for the recipe. I just went and fried them all up in butter. Then I took the leftovers, added some salt, and ate them like a snack.

My God, I have never had a more decadent, hedonistic snack in my life. They are like eating angel's tears. If they weren't so expensive, I'd eat my weight in them.

The Pinenut 01S on the other hand is quite well priced [1] at just $2 each [2]!

[1] https://www.pine64.org/pinenut/

[2] https://pine64.com/product/pinenut-model01s-wifi-ble5-module...

This not nuts-to-nuts comparison. How much would 1kg of them cost?

1 kg would be 500 (at a stated weight of 0.002 kg), so $995

You can harvest your own (Pinus monophylla) pine nuts in Great Basin National Park: https://www.nps.gov/grba/planyourvisit/pinenutgathering.htm -- I highly recommend it, it's a great park and you'll really get a sense for the labor involved (and some pine nuts). If you're in the Bay Area the drive out across Route 50 (the Loneliest Road In America) is beautiful as well.

I had to develop a taste for walnut pesto. Pine nuts make better pesto but not so much better that they're worth the extra cost.

Cashews, brazil nuts or even almonds are all fine so long as you quickly toast them first they taste awesome.

No they are not, I belong to the Pesto Striking force and you can definitely tell the difference. :)

On the other hand there are smaller, cheaper pine nuts coming from China available here in Europe that are pretty OK for the job. But I'm bit worried by how they are collected, labor wise.

I generally don't buy any food from China - simply don't trust the health regulations. Seaweed I get from Japan or US, pine nuts - anywhere but China. Of course I'm sure I'm getting quite a bit from China when I'm in restaurants but imho it's not a binary thing - just try to reduce risk.

I didn't say they don't taste different, just as good. One of the best (and Italian) chefs in the world uses bread not nuts so I think the swapping for different nuts isn't the end of the world. Massimo Bottura: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=adyRuV2eJlM

You two have opened up my eyes. These actually sound better than pine nuts to me

Came here to make same comment. My family grows basil every summer and our pesto consumption would bankrupt us if we used pine nuts.

I once had some pistachio pesto on a pizza. I wasn't sure what to expect, but it ended up being delicious.

It isn't a one-to-one substitute, but Sunflower Pesto can also be delicious on some dishes.

Pistachio pesto is also a very good option.

They are not even remotely as expensive in Russia, most common sold variety is shelled, of course. Also, nobody climbs trees to collect them, they use huge mallet to strike tree trunk wearing protective head gear and then collect pine cones from the ground.

Everyone should try harvesting a pine nut from a local pine. They all have them they just might not be of a size worth the effort. It is a good learning experience though!

In summer, pick up fallen green pine cones. Wait til they start opening up. Start at the bottom and relish every one you manage to free.

Do you know if other conifers have edible & tasty seeds in the cones, or is it only pines?

The seeds(known as pinhão) from Araucaria angustifolia are edible and tasty too, they're larger than pinoli and a common winter delicacy in the southern states of Brazil

I wonder if there are others

I remember as a child I would often go with my parents to gather pine seeds as we have many pines where I grew up. There were really a lot to be found in the right periods, literally on the streets.

Nowadays for some reason they're almost impossible to find, not sure if this happens because everyone realized how valuable they are and is rushing to gather them.

Maybe it was a bad year? Trees alternate from Bumper to Barren.

https://www.fusion360ag.com/alternate-bearing-trees-bumper-c...

Expensive? When my wife wants some, she goes out in grandma's back yard (New Mexico) and shakes some pinecones. All it costs is, getting your hands a bit sappy.

Sadly, we've lost most of our pinyons in this part of NM due to drought! There are quite a few saplings coming back, however.

I feel like "a bit sappy" is something of an understatement--they're REALLY sappy trees! But, hey, nothing a little isopropyl can't fix!

You also have to shell them! Any tips on how to do that?

Smash them with a rock. If they don't break, the rock isn't heavy enough. If the nut gets smooshed as well as the shell, the rock is too heavy. Iterate until you find the perfect rock and then hold onto it like a sea otter.

I'll ask

Rolling pin!

Definitely tried a rolling pin with no luck. Maybe the shells on these nuts are thicker than a traditional pinyon.

My wife has her Aunt's old pasta rolling pin. It's three feet long, 6 inches thick and weight as much as a fence post. So there's that.

Ah, the chalghoza as it is called in Pakistan (mostly imported from Afghanistan).

The word comes from the persian words chehel = 40 (iirc) and ghoza = seed pod.

Somewhat off-topic, but I'd really like to know the real reason I can't buy Turpentine in CA.

The petrochemicals they allow are more toxic than a pine tree distillate you can probably drink.

It's created a situation where there's basically no food-safe thinners sold on the shelves of my local CA hardware stores. Never in my life would I have imagined the turpentine I handled in childhood would one day be difficult to access contraband...

I ended up buying a can out of state to thin some pure tung oil for finishing a food surface. Boggles the mind.

Sounds like a job for trained squirrels.

Sounds tricky. I'm imagining an orchard with a false floor: when the squirrels bury the nuts, they fall through to a conveyor belt.

Now you can add "squirrel trolling" to your résumé, sweet.

Yeah, Oompa Loompas wouldn't be able to get the whole nut out without breaking it.

I have a couple a friends that own a pine cone processing plant in Portugal. Yes harvesting pine cones is labor intensive and the end product expensive but I think one of the main reasons price became so high was the introduction of plague in Europe causing a shortage of pine trees and increased cost of pine cones.

They sell under the brand PineFlavour https://pineflavour.com/en/

I've been really enjoying this kind of content that Business Insider has been putting out. I've been watching their content on YouTube about why things are so expensive and about businesses that have been around for hundreds of years ("Still Standing"). Highly recommend y'all check out their content.

https://www.youtube.com/user/businessinsider/videos

Side note: I've had a recipe that calls for pine nuts for a while, and have had to use walnuts because no grocery store within 30 miles carries them.

China just started importing a bunch of pine nuts from Afghanistan. https://www.aa.com.tr/en/asia-pacific/china-gets-1st-shipmen...

I buy a bag of 50grams for about 2-3 euros in my local supermarket. 40-60 Euros/kg. Lets call it about 70$/kg. Of course a whole kilo would be quite a lot. 50grams is a good amount if you are making pesto, which I do a lot because I grow lots of Basil on my balcony

Looks like a good application for a drone with shears...

Can the safety regimen really not be improved here? It seems like just having a harness would help.

so about $10 for each 50lbs worth of selected pine cones.

and a single worker can get about 936 lbs per day. or $187/day worth per worker.

whew. US migrants make more than that.

How have drones not solved this problem yet?

Flying with drones through a tree can be incredibly difficult. Secondly, someone steering a drone will probably not have the same yields as someone climbing. In consequence, this would require the whole drone process to be fully automated. A fully autonomous drone flying through trees recognizing the correct cones and managing to harvest them is even harder. Add the short battery life and I fear the economics simply don't work out.

making a 8-legged drone to spider up a pine tree would be more attainable in reaching those pine cones on thin branches.

Monkeys would be massively cheaper than drones.

Did anyone else find that website's ads and non-content placement to be utter garbage?

Man this site is toxic, full page cover "lets talk about your adblocker", meanwhile a video with sound is playing in the background and you can't do anything about it. Seriously, what do they expect people to do? I know I hit the close tab in record time.

Ublock Origin kills the popover and the auto-play video, but the site also appears to be blank outside of the first paragraph of the article.

I also closed the tab immediately.

There is only one paragraph. The page is a just a holder for the video.

Firefox Tracking Protection blocked most everything on the page all by itself, even the content.

I'm just using Firefox, no add-ons, no pihole, and I only get one paragraph.

You'll find it easier to just watch the video on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k88Cu5SoABg

Changed above from https://www.businessinsider.com/why-pine-nuts-are-so-expensi.... Thanks!

I've been having a very good experience using Safari with "Stop auto-play" turned on, and the AdGuard extension installed.

You can enable search ads, self-promotion, and other non-obtrusive advertising in the "Other" category, but it continues to successfully block the nasty ads, including the anti-adblocker popups.

Recommended.

Didn't happen whith hosts-based AB. Also no autoplay. Had to explicitely click on the play button in the middle of the still frame.

Besides that it looked like about 3 pages of empty white space, which I scrolled through to find the missing article.

Complaining about website layouts and design is against HN guidelines.

This is an important issue that goes beyond layout and design. When active elements of a web site generate extreme distractions or lock up the browser or even the entire computer then not only is that site largely unusable with the content being unreadable but it also impacts any other use or application of the computer. This is a serious problem which has been growing worse over time with the bulking up of web content and proliferation of trackers and aggressive promotions.

It makes sense that many resort to ad and script blockers of various sorts, but it is also pretty clear that this has led to escalation and competition. Instead of being confident that powerful machines and blockers can solve this we need to find some way of taming the problem that ordinary people with ordinary browsers and configurations and machines can use to navigate the web and access content while retaining basic control of their attention, their browser, and their machines that they own.

I completely agree with you. Such comments are still against the site's guidelines.

Then you are not agreeing with me at all. In my opinion these issues have to do primarily with the out of control scale and scripting of modern sites. Scale and scripting has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with layout and graphical design which is the target of the site guidelines. Reasonable people can differ but let us be clear about the lines we are both drawing.

Why? Because the people responsible for the abusive website might see the complaints and be offended?

Personally I'd prefer a warning about sites that pull the things like what this one does. I see that people are already warning about PDF files, some other similar warning about autoplay that can't be easily stopped would be nice for office environments.

I didn't know it was against guidelines. Often I'll come to the comments to see things like links to web archive to get a better or working link to contents. Comments are helpful, don't know why such a thing would be against guidelines.

Edit; a number of other comments are listed here about blockers etc etc. Maybe it would make more sense to not post sites that pull stuff like this at all?

>Please don't complain about website formatting...

>They're too common to be interesting.

>Exception: when the author is present. Then friendly feedback might be helpful.

Here's the summary of the article, which is also all the text content of the "article", straight from the page to save you a click:

    * Shelled pine nuts can cost $117 per kilogram.
    * The majority of pine nuts we buy come from natural forests.
    * Harvesting pine nuts is extremely dangerous, and labor is expensive.

That's just the caption for the video which plays for about 7 minutes and is actually watchable if you're interested in the steps they need from people climbing into trees, collecting cones up there, and all the steps between that, and arriving where you can buy them packaged.

Thank you!

Well each male tree only has two of them and you have to wait until puberty for them to be ripe. So ya, they're gonna be expensive.

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