Get a nutcracker with a cup for the nut to sit in, rather than the old hinged pliers kind.
The pliers type is what most of us grew up with, and there’s a reason it only comes out at Christmas. You balance a walnut between two flat jaws and squeeze. Half the time the nut shoots out sideways before it cracks. When it does crack, it tends to go all at once, and bits of shell end up by the back door. And every so often you pinch the skin of your palm where the handles meet, which is what finally puts most people off.
A cup-style cracker fixes the slipping, which is the root of the other two problems. The Anwenk one has a round cup, about 2 inches across at its widest, lined with rows of little teeth. The nut drops in, the teeth grip it, and the other jaw pushes in from the side as you squeeze the handles. Because the nut can’t roll away, you can press slowly until you hear it give instead of clamping down hard and hoping. Most of the broken shell stays in the cup or drops straight down.
What it handles, and what it won’t
Pecans, hazelnuts, almonds, ordinary walnuts and Brazil nuts are all listed as fine. Anwenk is upfront that it may not cope with black walnuts or macadamias, and I’d take them at their word. Those shells are properly hard, and you want a screw-type or lever cracker for them. For a bag of mixed nuts in the shell from the supermarket, though, this covers pretty much everything in it.
There’s a spring between the handles, so it opens back up by itself after each nut. That sounds minor until you’ve done forty walnuts for a coffee and walnut cake and realised how much of the effort was prising the handles apart again.
The body is enamelled die-cast aluminium and the handles are wood. The wood is warmer to hold than bare metal, which the listing makes a point of. It’s about 7 inches long and weighs roughly 7 ounces, so it sits in a drawer without taking over. The back of the cup also works as a bottle opener, if that’s useful to you.
A couple of tips
- Put walnuts in with the seam facing the moving jaw. They split cleanly along it and you get more halves.
- Do it over a tray or a tea towel anyway. The cup cuts the mess down a lot, but not to zero.
- For pecans, squeeze until you hear the first crack and stop. Keep going and the nut inside goes to crumbs.
