Talk:Pine nut

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Pinon Pine Nuts are an important traditional holiday and seasonal food throught out the Southwestern U.S. Families would collect the food in the fall and have it available through out the holidays. Everyone from the southwest recounts family stories of collecting and roasting pinon nuts. Gift giving of roasted pinon pine nuts was a common practice. The smell of roasting pinon is absolutely enticing. On the East Coast of United States, the nuts were sold as "Indian Nuts". Unless people use the traditions they are forgotten. The draught and other factors have impacted the Pinyon's nut production. If your purchase pine nuts pre- roasted, ASK how what process was used. We advise against MICROWAVE ROASTING. It ruins the food.

Many, many web sites wish to call any pine nut a pinon. The real test of a Pinon Nut falls within the law of New Mexico:

25-10-2. Unlawful labeling, advertising or selling of products as pinon nuts.

A. It is unlawful for any person to package any product and label the product as pinon nuts or as containing pinon nuts or to use the words pinon nuts in any prominent location on the label of such product or to advertise, sell or offer for sale any product which is labeled pinon nuts or as containing pinon nuts unless the product consists of pinon nuts or uses pinon nuts as an ingredient in the product.

B. As used in this section, "pinon nuts" means the edible nut which is the product of the pinon tree, scientifically known as genus "pinus", subgenus "strobus", section "parrya", subsection "cembroides"

Public Land use in the United States and Pine Nuts POLITICS OF PUBLIC LAND and Special Interests

The politics of the Western cattle industry and public land grazing is the primary reason. From 1950-72 the USFS and BLM cleared ("chained") over 3,211,000 acres of pinion-juniper to create grazing land. Before the huge corporations controlled grazing permits, pine nuts were harvested by the box car load and readily available. Those were the days before the chain-saw, bull dozer, massive herbicide treatments, the American Cattle’s Association and the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). The days before large expanses of maturing pine nut trees were destroyed to grow grass for cattle --- at taxpayer expense. Pinyon pinenuts sustained the native peoples of the Great Basin for over 10,000 years. The soft-shelled pinyon pinenut, (p.monophylla) provided primary protein to the Shoshone, Piautes and Washo peoples, containing substantial amounts of the amino acids necessary for human growth. It was a sacred part of the way they lived. Between 1865 to 1877, Native lands had been overrun with cattle and sheep. The pinion pines, which they depended upon for a pine nut crop each fall, were rapidly being cut down for fuel for the mine smelters. Smelting a ton of ore required from twenty-five to thirty-five bushels of charcoal. The mills at Eureka consumed as much as 1.25 million bushels of charcoal a year, destroying the Indians' pine nut groves.

I have worked very hard with land use and pine nuts in the United States. The contribution is based on material from my web site and I am pleased to see this excellent forum. Pinon Penny

The laws cited above of course only apply in New Mexico. The definition of 'piñon' depends on language; in the original Spanish, it referred primarily to the European species Pinus pinea, but simply means 'pine nut' without any precise species definition and only later used for Pinus cembroides etc by Spanish colonists. I suspect the New Mexico law could easily be challenged in court, should someone wish to do so - MPF 14:46, 20 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Branding regional foods is a topic in itself. It would be an interesting legal question for many reasons and yes, it is only the jurisdiction of New Mexico which has enacted branding laws for pinon. Using the word "pinon" to mean any pine nut, at least in the US is a risky way way to communicate about pine nuts. People know P.edulis and P. monophylla flavor and are not happy when other species are substituted. Pine nuts are so rich in species diversity that one would think people would wish to educate about the special qualities of their regional species.

I'm not convinced how much variation there is between species; by far the biggest difference is between fresh, and stale, pine nuts, regardless of species. Which is why each group of people, everywhere, says their local species tastes best, because the imported ones are no longer fresh and don't taste good any more. Ask a Spaniard in Spain, and they'll tell you Pinus pinea tastes best, as that's local grown and fresh. Ask a Korean in Korea, and they'll say Pinus koraiensis. Any pine nut, whatever species, once it's been shipped half way round the world (usually not refrigerated, either), no longer tastes good. My test for a fresh pine nut is to see if it will germinate; so far, I've never succeeded with any shop-bought pine nut. - MPF 20:03, 21 Oct 2004 (UTC)

The freshness is key with any food. Most nuts arrive in the market place with the shell removed, with the living energy is gone. Mother Natures packing is by far the best. I bring pinon from the forest myself, and almost to the tree know when and how the nuts were picked. My favorite is P.monophylla. Pinus koraiensis is impressive to me, as well. I do not care for P.Pinea and P. Sibiricus oil is when cold pressed and properly handled is outstanding. I believe there are great variations in species, but obtaining the fresh product is indeed very difficult. Grafting confirs for nut productions is topic worthy of consideration. It would be an interesting thing to try different species for grafting.

Contents

[edit] Red Indian

Hey, would anyone object if I removed the phrase Red Indian from this text? I know it's used overseas to differentiate native American Indians from subcontinential India Indians, but it's considered somewhat offensive here in the U.S. to call people by color. Thanks. jengod 20:50, 26 December 2005 (UTC)

The reason it is there is to provide the etymological derivation of the term "Indian nuts", which is otherwise a rather confusing term. By all means re-word it (or remove mention of "Indian nuts" altogether? Is it that common a term?), but if the term "Indian nuts" is to be retained, it also needs to be explained. Wikipedia has plenty of other cases of historical terms now considered offensive that are mentioned out of need for etymological or historical context - MPF 22:34, 26 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Merging Pine nut oil

MPF recently merged Pine nut oil into Pine nut with the edit comment "not an important enough product for its own article". I've reverted the merge and put a {{mergeto}} tag on the article to follow standard procedure for merging articles.

  • Oppose Personally, I disagree with the merger. It's not really WP's call whether pine nut oil is "an important enough product". I'd argue for keeping it, on the following basis:
    • The article length is comparable to the length of other stub articles on comparable subjects, and there's enough to say that the article could be expanded considerably, if someone is interested.
    • There exist Web site devoted to the subject, at least in part, so there are sources of information to draw from.
    • As with many oils and the plants that they are derived from, the audience of the two articles are sufficiently different to merit separate articles.
    • Most of the oils on List of vegetable oils have their own articles, and there's no particular reason to think that Pine nut oil is less worthy of a separate article than these are.
Waitak 01:02, 27 September 2006 (UTC)
  • Support merge. "There exist Web site devoted to the subject" - I don't find this; I find websites devoted to pine nuts, which include information on the oil as a secondary topic within the site. Also the information in the pine nut oil article is very sketchy, and adding extra information (e.g. a list of pine seeds it is extracted from) would largely duplicate this page anyway. I also think details of the flavour (since both seeds and oil are mainly used as flavourings, not having significantly different uses) are largely duplication. In this it differs from most of the other items at List of vegetable oils, where there is often a substantial difference in use of the seed and the oil. - MPF 14:50, 29 September 2006 (UTC)
  • Support. If the section on the oil in this article gets unreasonably large, then it should be split out (and summarized in summary style), but for now it makes a perfect little section. If you don't want it to be merged, write more content. —Keenan Pepper 05:38, 30 September 2006 (UTC)
  • Comment Fair enough. I love a good challenge. :-) I've added a fair bit more in the current pine nut oil article. Waitak 08:35, 30 September 2006 (UTC)
  • Oh cool! Didn't expect you to actually do it. I'll write a summary section for this article. —Keenan Pepper 18:11, 30 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Highest protein of any nut?

I've seen the line about 31 grams of protein all over the internet but I don't see where it came from. However, the US Nutritional database says that pine nuts have only about 13g of protein per 100g of nuts. 72.13.132.211 17:00, 23 August 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Unsubstantiated and illogical claim?

"Pine nuts are commercially available in shelled form, but due to poor storage, these rarely have a good flavour and may be already rancid at the time of purchase."

Here in the UK pine nuts are only available shelled and I've never come across a pack that are already rancid. Wouldn't it be pointless for the supermarket to sell pine nuts that they know will go rotten? Also, they taste fine to me... Monkeyspearfish (talk) 14:08, 15 December 2007 (UTC)

Try germinating some and see if you can get them to grow. That's the best test for freshness. I've never succeeded. - MPF (talk) 09:54, 25 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Pinoli vs. Pignoli

It says that in Italian, these are called "pinoli", or rarely "pignoli" nuts. I've never called them Pinoli, and all I've ever heard people say is pignoli. I think the word "rarely" should be removed.72.78.9.230 (talk) 22:12, 9 February 2008 (UTC)

According to [1], pine nut is "pinolo" in Italian, and "pignon" in French. As far as possible variants on those terms, in either language (or English, for that matter), I am totally clueless. Just thought I would add my two cents. --SweetNightmares (talk) 05:00, 27 February 2008 (UTC)
I've worked in restaurants that use these pine nuts and all the labels I've come across had (Pignoli) on the label after the "English" name.. --Sealicus