Foraging for Ginkgo Nuts

Reader Contribution by Leda Meredith
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You can smell ginkgo fruit long before you arrive at the tree, and it’s not a pleasant experience. But once you get rid of the stinky orange pulp, there is a culinary jewel waiting in the “nut” inside.

Ginkgo (Ginkgo biloba) is a fascinating tree. Apparently it is a living fossil that evolved before there were flowering plants. Ginkgo’s fan-shaped leaves with veins running all the way to the edges of each leaf are unique among trees. In autumn they turn bright yellow before falling. The leaves are the part of the tree used to produce the memory-enhancing tinctures you can buy at the health food store. These trees are disease and insect resistant and can be extremely long-lived. There are ginkgo trees in China that are close to 2,500 years old! They are also pollution-tolerant, which is one reason so many ginkgos have been planted as street trees in cities.

There is a catch, though: there are both male and female ginkgo trees, and only the males were intended to planted used as street trees (they don’t produce the smelly fruits). But when they aren’t fruiting, the male and female trees are difficult to tell apart, and numerous fruiting female ginkgos found their way to our streets and parks. That’s good news for urban and suburban foragers. The orange fruits, about the size of a ping pong ball, ripen and fall to the ground in the fall. Inside the smelly pulp is a thin-shelled kernel about 3/4-inch long that is easily cracked. And inside that there is a pistachio-green “nut” that is delicious once roasted.

The roasting part is not optional — raw ginkgo nuts are not edible. See the directions below for how to roast ginkgo nuts. I should mention that scientifically ginkgo nuts are not really nuts and ginkgo fruits are not really fruits. Somehow roasted gametophytes doesn’t sound as tasty as roasted ginkgo nuts, so I’m going to stick with the commonly used culinary name and ignore the scientific jargon. Ginkgo is a popular food in Asian communities where people often “field dress” — clean on the spot — the nuts. You’ll know that’s what happened when you find a heap of the smelly pulp at the base of a ginkgo tree and all the nuts are gone. Then again, you don’t have to be in an Asian community for that to happen. It also occurs if I got there before you did.

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