Cashew Nuts

This time last year, I wrote about cashew fruit. When cashew season came around this time, I decided to experiment with the cashew nut itself, and I recruited a Beninese friend to help me.

Look closely and you can see a cashew nut hanging at the bottom of this cashew fruit.

These are the cashew nuts I collected from the ground beneath the cashew tree.

The cashew nuts are enclosed in a hard shell that must be removed to get at the nut. The shell contains a toxic substance, so it must be removed with a special process. There are actually several means of removing the nut, but in Benin, we use fire.

A can of nuts is perched on three rocks so that we can light a fire underneath.

My friend changed his mind and decided to use corrugated tin instead of the can in order to roast all the nuts at once. Here, he is poking holes in the tin.

My friend has lit the fire under the tin. See that smoke? That is a toxic gas released by the burning shells.

The nuts are on fire! The oil in the shell is highly flammable.

My friend rubs the nuts in dirt to extinguish the fire and make them stop smoldering.

The next step, not pictured here, is to whack open the shells and extract the nut. After having been burned, the shells look like charcoal and are just as brittle. Inside is the nut.

Ultimately, our experiment did not produce many viable nuts. My friend said that he let the nuts burn too long.

As I shared in my cashew blog post last year, it is rare to find cashews for sale here because most cashews are sent to India for processing. I was told that when the Beninese do decide to process the cashew nuts, it is usually just done by teenage boys who enjoy a little pyromania. In particular, it is said that few women attempt to process cashew nuts because of the danger involved.