If anyone has ever tried liberating a Black Walnut from its shell, you understand how difficult the task can be. Black Walnut are very hard. To get more than a meager handful of meats is a major project. For those of you who read the ending first, the cools stuff happens at Step 5.

Here is my tested technique to get the maximum number of walnut chucks, sans the shells, relatively quickly.

Step 1. Get a clean metal bucket, a clean sled hammer, and safety glasses.

Step 2. Put a handful of cleaned and totally dry black walnuts into bucket. Only the rock hard part of the Black Walnut goes into the bucket. This presumes that you have already removed the iodine-rich soft outer husks. If you haven't already removed the outer husk, this needs to be done first. I don't have a quick way to perform this prep other than just letting them totally dry out. Then the husks can be easy removed.

Step 3. Mash the walnuts into smaller piece, until you can see the walnut meats are being liberated from the hard shells. At this point, you should end up with thousands of pieces roughly mashed walnets shells and meats. The pieces of the meats that are still stuck in shells are too large and need to be broken down further.

Step 4. Using a large plastic graduated cylinder or suitable container, make a super saturated water & salt solution. I don't have exact measurements, but just keep dumping in more salt into the water until it stops being mixed the water and starts to pile up a little at the bottom while you stir it.

Step 5. Dump in the mashed up bits and chunck of black walnuts. Immediately, the shells and the meats separate like magic. The meats float, and the shells sink. Give it a good stir and push everything down as you stir. You need to perform the process more than once to remove all the stubborn tiny parts that float too. Usually twice more does the trick, but not always. Keep an eye out for floating shell parts. I have separate containers for the three procedures, moving the floating result from container to container.

Step 6. Rinse the remaining nuts or not. But at this point they will be super salty. I like to rinse them a little.

Step 7. Enjoy.

Step 8. If you repeat the process, the solutions will need recharging with more salt.