Ginkgo Nuts

Whenever I'd go into an Asian grocery store, I'd look for ginkgo nuts. I absolutely love ginkgo nuts — they have this unique, indescribable flavor, fragrant, slightly bitter, with an amazing translucent jade color. It's like finding treasure anytime I see them in a dish. Unfortunately, the only ginkgo nuts I ever saw in stores were processed versions in the frozen cases. (I don't know what they do to those poor nuts, but frozen, packaged ginkgo nuts are pretty horrible.) My mother couldn't understand. She says you see them fresh all the time. Really? Where?

Well, apparently, everywhere. I just didn't know what I was looking for. In fact, Asian grocery stores have piles and piles of them. Which they label as "white nuts". Having never seen fresh ginkgo nuts, I had no idea these "white nuts" were ginkgo nuts!

Thrilled with the discovery, I brought a small bag home. Wow. Ginkgo nuts are hard to shell. They were too small for my nut crackers so I had to use the back end of a knife. It takes two smacks. The first smack at the large end goes pretty well. The second smack never does, the knife smashing into the little end so that I rarely got a nice whole nut.

Now what to do with all these nuts? Most recipes only call for a small handful. Doing some research on the Internet, I found this advice from Lisa Katayama at Boing Boing. She likes to eat them fried and salted. There is something really wonderful about frying ginkgo nuts — something about the light covering of oil really brings out the nuttiness. A really interesting part of Lisa's post was the warning from her aunt: don't eat more than ten or you'll get indigestion and nose bleeds. I'd never heard that before! Upon further research, I turned up more warnings about the possible toxicity of ginkgo nuts. Quite a few people advise that you remove the "xin" inside the nut (a little strip which you can find by halving the nut — you can sort of see it in this picture).

And Wikipedia says:

When eaten by children, in large quantities (over 5 seeds a day), or over a long period, the raw gametophyte (meat) of the seed can cause poisoning by MPN (4-methoxypyridoxine). Studies have demonstrated that convulsions caused by MPN can be prevented or terminated with pyridoxine.

No idea what a gametophyte is (even after looking up the word), but I think the end advice is not to eat too many ginkgo nuts!