A few days ago, I harvested a small mountain of ginkgo fruit from a street in Amsterdam. Today I finally got around to soaking and cleaning them. Previously I have then dried them to store in a jar or roasted and eaten as many as I fancied. But they do spoil quickly even when cooked so roasted Ginkgo nuts are best eaten swiftly. Also, the ones I have dried to store, often sweat a bit more than I’d like, whilst sat in the glass container, so I’ve been looking for better preservation methods. Tonight I was looking through a book by Steve Brill (of NY Central Park) and he suggests roasting the lot and then freezing them for later use. To bring them back to life, so to speak, the frozen nuts should be roasted again for just a couple of minutes. So after reserving a handful to stratify over winter (as kindly recommended by Fran from Serendipity Farm in Tasmania), the rest have been roasted for 15 minutes and now cooled, reside in my freezer. The Apprentice group can test the results tomorrow morning!

Much as I love the taste of these nuts, I’m done with the pukey smell when I clean the fruit off, so that’s it for my Ginkgo foray this year. I’d also like to thank everyone who joined me to help clean up these smelly fruit and nuts over the past couple of weeks (they don’t smell bad when they are finally cooked by the way). Several of my colleagues have told me that they think the foraging this year has made a difference to the street where we work – less smell and less squishy fruit to avoid on the pavement. So I think it was all well worth it!