The nuts ripen continuously for a six-month period, so each tree must be harvested five or six separate times.
It takes five years for a tree to start bearing fruit and 15 years to reach full production. But even if there were twice the number of orchards, macadamias would still be expensive. Retailing for upward of $15 a pound (shelled), macadamias rank among the world’s costliest nuts. Inspired by the nut’s success, growers are now experimenting with growing macadamias in Florida and California. Not bad for a product that as recently as 20 years ago was virtually unknown in the continental United States. Today, the industry is dominated by the Mauna Loa Macadamia Nut Corp., which owns more than 10,000 acres of macadamia orchards and more than a million individual trees. In the early 1920s, Van Tassel planted the island’s first macadamia plantation, and by the 1930s, his nuts were a common sight at local grocery stores. It took a businessman from Massachusetts, Ernest Shelton Van Tassel, to recognize the nut’s culinary and commercial potential.Īt the time, islanders would serve macadamia nuts sauteed in butter as a snack to accompany cocktails. He named it after his friend, Australian scientist John Macadam, in 1857.Ĭuriously, for the next few decades, the tree was prized as an ornamental, not a food source, even after its arrival in Hawaii in the 1870s. The first European to “discover” the tree was botanist Ferdinand von Mueller. Native to Australia, macadamia nuts were first eaten by the aborigines, who flocked to slopes of the Great Dividing Range in eastern Australia each fall to collect and feast on the seeds. Each spray yields two to 10 nutlets, which develop into macadamia nuts. The tree produces long sprays of perfumed white flowers (as many as 600 to a spray) that blossom throughout the year. The macadamia nut grows on a tall, subtropical evergreen tree whose dark leaves are shaped like holly. Though the macadamia has a refined, delicate flavor, you would never call it bland. Imagine an orb the size of a large hazelnut, straw-colored and softly crunchy, with a mild, sweet-salty, fruity, buttery flavor and the richness of heavy cream. Hawaiians reportedly would place the nuts between boards and drive over them in their cars to extract the sweet meats from the iron-hard shells.Įxceptional measures, perhaps, but then the macadamia is no ordinary nut.
This soft, buttery nut hides in a shell so hard that it takes a pressure of more than 300 pounds per square inch to crack it. The least-likely-to-be-eaten member of the nut family is the once-rare but increasingly popular macadamia nut. And what could be more off-putting than a gnarled, closed-tight oyster shell dripping salt water, or a hive full of angry bees protecting their cache of honey? Consider the artichoke, whose barbed petals serve as a botanical suit of armor, or rhubarb, whose leaves are poisonous. Among the world’s great gastronomic mysteries is how our forebears learned to eat inaccessible or seemingly inedible foods.