Nuts !

Today was another wander-around day.  'Oh the joys of retirement' they say.  We sorta of wanted to visit a mall near Mobile so we head west towards the little town of Fairhope AL.  Seeing the back yard of America suits us just fine.  Anyway after snooping around Fairhope, which is filled with many neat shops, we headed north along the coast of Mobile Bay.  Not long along this new direction, we stumbled across the B&B Pecan Company.  Now if you have never been to a nut farm (excluding medical ones), make a point to stop in and see what's going on.

Immaculate rows of mature pecan trees dot the surrounding land.  The lawn underneath these large sprawling trees are trimmed close and as clean as my bank account after Christmas.  It appears, by the look of the trees, the season was near its end as there was little of anything left in them.  As the ripe nut falls to the ground, mechanical sweepers harvest the nuts and move them along for further processing.  Cracking, cleaning, sorting and packaging follow.

We found the retail office and walked into pecan nirvana.  Raw pecans, salted pecans, pecan pies, pecan oil, pecan cookbooks, chocolate covered pecans, pecans in the shell, pecan crackers, pecans in tins, pecans in bags, pick your own pecans ... and, as it turns out ... over 40 varieties of pecans.  OMG ... we were in nut overload.

From an adjoining room I could hear some machinery running so I asked the counter guys if I could see what was going on and maybe take some pictures.  He agreed and led me into the special processing room.  Lined up along one wall were four nut cracking machines.  Note this is not a state-of-the-art processing area.  It's pretty crude and very labor intensive.  Apparently they use this just for small special batches so the equipment is old and not designed for high volume.  A young man working in the room takes a large bag of recently harvested nuts and dumps them into a hopper atop the cracking machine.  As each individual nut passes around a rotating do-dad (my best description), a little ram smashed the nut hull with just enough force to just crack the shell .. but not damage the nut meat.  These cracked nuts are then tossed into a large sifter where he finishes opening each nuts manually and sorts out any bad ones.   Now here's a job that would literally drive me nuts.

I returned to the retail office and continued my 'nutty' discussion with the counter guy.  I interrogated him about the pecan nut business as if he was just featured on America's Most Wanted tv show.  How many pounds do you get off a tree each season? (1000lbs), what percent are good? (80), why are there so many varities? (different uses [eating, cooking, oil] and some are grown resist certain diseases) and on and on.

Great folks there at B & B Pecan Company.  So stop in and pay them a visit ... you'll go nuts.
You can visit (and order) online too!  http://www.pecangifts.com/  Christmas orders being taken now.

As I write this, I broke into our 1lb bag of fresh, unsalted pecans.  I could bore you with my musings of our trip to the shopping malls we visited later in the day but it's hard to type with one hand in the bag.

Still livin' this 'nutty dream.

Phil