This week on the Local Food Report, we talk about hickory oil.
Jesse Marksohn and Miller Ward of Yellowbud Farm in Northfield, Massachusetts are completely obsessed with growing staple crops on trees.
Miller: Our main focus is on oaks, hickories, chestnuts, mulberries, persimmons, and honey locusts.
This list might sound familiar. If you’ve been listening for a while, you know that I just wrote a book called Feed Us with Trees, and it focuses on a lot of the same species. But the one nut on this list that I haven’t talked a ton about is actually the one Miller is the most excited about growing and eating.
Miller: Yellow bud hickory, Carya cordiformis, most people probably know them as bitter nut hickory.
If you’ve heard of bitternuts at all, you’ve likely heard they’re inedible. But Miller says this is completely misleading.
Miller: There's a lot of misinformation about this species. If you ask the USDA, it says that they're inedible to humans and unpalatable to wildlife and neither could really be farther from the truth. Many times trees get picked completely clean before we can get a single one by squirrels and chipmunks. And they were one of if not the most important perennial staple food crops in the eastern U.S. for 8,000-plus years.
That might come as a shock— especially because as the name implies, bitternut hickories are quite bitter tasting. Straight off the tree the nuts are filled with tannins—water soluble molecules that have to be leached out to make them sweet, just like with acorns or olives. But, these tannins are not in the fat —so if you’re going for hickory oil production—again just like olives—no leaching is necessary. Here’s Jesse:
Jesse: They truly are an incredibly nutritious oil that's very abundantly bearing and easy to process. So it's like we forgot that we have a tree as significant culturally, nutritionally, ecologically as an olive in Mediterranean climates.
To Jesse and Miller, bitternut hickories are the olives of our region and the best of the best when it comes to oil production from native nut species. Other hickories, like pecans, might taste better straight off the tree, but bitternut hickories have a super thin shell, which makes them way better for oil processing.
Miller: And the kind of thought there is that a lot of hickories through a coevolution route went for really thick shells to stop predation, but yellowbuds diverged and went for a really high tannin contents, which is why their shells are so thin. And that's a benefit because then they then put less energy into their husks and shells and more into their kernel meat. And you can crack these with your teeth, where if you tried to do that with a shagbark, your dentist would thank you, but I don't recommend it.
These thin shells also make processing easy. The nutmeats inside have between 70 and 80 percent fat content, and if you run the nuts whole in the shell through an expeller press, Miller says you get a bright yellow oil ready for cooking.
Miller: Again, you can really think of it like olive oil for use. There's two main versions of oil that are made. One is a roasted version and the other is unroasted. The roasted version has a much stronger flavor, just like you could toast sesame seeds, it brings out more flavor. It's very rich, buttery. We kind of describe the flavor as liquid pecan. And then the roasted version that flavor is still there but it's much more mild.
This is good, because while sometimes you definitely want liquid pecan, you might not want that when you’re cooking curry or something where you want the flavor of your oil in the background of what you’re making. Bitternut hickories grow from Florida to Texas to Ontario to Maine—and have been overlooked by dominant American culture as a food crop for centuries. Today Miller Ward and Jesse Marksohn are part of a growing movement of agro-foresters determined to jumpstart a regional bitternut hickory industry. For CAI’s Local Food Report, I’m Elspeth Hay.
Here’s a link to learn more about what's happening with bitternut hickory in New England:
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2026/01/19/metro/new-england-hickory-oil-nh/
