I was out for a walk at the end of September when I noticed fallen purple jewels all along the trail. They were the ripe fruit of the California bay laurel tree (Umbellularia californica), also known as pepperwood or, if you’re in Southern Oregon, the myrtle tree.
Curious, I brought home a handful and took them apart. The skin peeled away to reveal a thin layer of green flesh and, inside that, a beautiful, smooth brown nut. When I turned to the Internet, I learned that bay nuts were an important food source for California’s indigenous people. The flavor of roasted bay nuts is most commonly compared to cacao and/or coffee. Like coffee, the nuts contain a stimulant; it’s similar to caffeine but not as long lasting. And if all that weren’t impressive enough, bay nuts have a nutritional content similar to walnuts. (This according to a lab analysis ordered by Anthony Cohen, a lawyer and bay nut advocate in Santa Rosa.)
I was powerfully intrigued and thought I might try roasting them some other year. But nature had a different plan. This is a boom year for bay nuts in my neighborhood. Our home is surrounded by bay trees and I’ve never seen anything like this. I can hardly take a step without crunching bay nuts underfoot. When I lean down to collect them, they keep falling on my head. Here’s a photo taken on our back deck . . .
For the past month or so, I’ve been gathering bay nuts, storing bay nuts, and roasting bay nuts. Several sources do a good job of explaining this process. If you want to learn, I recommend How to Forage and Prepare Bay Nuts at Bay Nature. It provides a well-organized summary to get you from picking them up off the ground to putting them into your mouth. Please just remember that there are several important steps in between: You must dry the nuts before you roast them and you must roast the nuts before you eat them. What you do with them after that is up to you.
Because it’s Christmas, I felt like trying some roasted bay nuts in a batch of brittle. I’m glad I did. The roasted nuts have a flavor unlike anything I’ve ever tasted. Yes, it’s sort of coffee, sort of chocolate, but you have to taste it for yourself. Likewise, there’s no “how it’s supposed to taste” when it comes to a recipe like this. I figured if it’s safe and I like it, it’s good. Also I got good reviews from everyone else who tried it; they found the flavor as compelling as I do.
I did get one surprise during the process. Bay nuts are very oily. When you add the nuts to the hot brittle mixture, the oil floods out like crazy. I just went with it, stirring well and pouring the mixture out onto my baking sheet as planned. Oil pooled out around the edges of the cooling brittle and I blotted it up. Then, though the brittle hardened perfectly at first, the oil in the nuts softened it up a bit after a couple of hours. In the end, the brittle was still firm, but it lost its snap. Some of you who are more experienced cooks or candy makers may have ideas about how to fix this for future batches. If you do, I hope you’ll send me a note via the contact page at shaeirving.com. I’ll come back here and share any updates at the end of this post. But this will be long since eaten up . . .
California Bay Nut Brittle
1/4 cup maple syrup
1 cup white sugar
1 cup butter
1/4 cup water
1/2 teaspoon sea salt
1 cup roasted bay nuts, coarsely chopped
Instructions
1. In heavy-bottomed saucepan, combine the syrup, sugar, butter, and water and stir over medium heat until melted and creamy.
2. Bring the mixture to a boil over high heat and continue to boil, stirring occasionally, until a candy thermometer reaches 300F (the “hard crack” stage).
3. Add the salt and stir in the bay nuts.
4. Pour the hot mixture onto an ungreased cookie sheet. (I used a silicone baking mat on mine which worked fine, though I’m not sure whether it contributed to the oil issue mentioned above.) Immediately spread the brittle mixture thin using the back of a wooden spoon.
5. Let the brittle cool completely then break it into pieces. Store in an airtight container.
Updates and Ideas for Other Bay Nut Recipes
December 26, 2018
A friend from Chicago who has great food sense suggested that I might try a version based on macadamia nut brittle because macadamias are also very oily. (I based this recipe on instructions for walnut brittle because of the similar nutritional composition, but the oil business surprised me!) She thought, too, that I might try reducing the butter.
We also mused about other things to do with roasted bay nuts. Nut butter came up as a possibility. I would probably want to mix it with another type of nut — a mild one — because it is such hard work to get a small quantity of these and the flavor is so strong.
Finally, at Christmas dinner last night there was an delicously rich paleo-vegan chocolate frosting from the book Everyday Detox. Someone raised the idea of making little truffles by making and freezing balls of the frosting (it had the right consistency for that) and then rolling them in crushed, roasted bay nuts. That would probably blow your mind a little bit at a time.
Helpful Bay Nut Resources
Sonoma County Bay Nuts May Be Chocolate of the Future, The Press Democrat
Roasted Bay Nuts, Edible East Bay
How to Forage and Prepare Bay Nuts, Bay Nature
The comment section on the post How to Eat Bay Nuts, by FeralKevin.
