Ginkgo nuts are seeds found in the fruit of ginkgo trees, popular in Chinese and Japanese cuisine. The nuts need to be dried, cracked, and boiled before eating. They can cause allergies and should be handled with gloves. Ginkgo nuts are believed to aid memory retention and are considered an aphrodisiac in traditional Chinese medicine. The ginkgo tree is ancient, and eating its nuts is like eating a food that early humans harvested.
Ginkgo nuts are the seeds of ginkgo trees, found within the extremely smelly fruit. Despite the fruit’s pungent smell, walnuts are very popular in traditional Chinese and Japanese cuisine, especially for special occasion dishes. Nuts are often roasted, where the similarity between ginkgo seeds and chestnut is even more closely understood.
Ripened ginkgo nuts grow into an oval shape, about 1 inch (2.54 cm) long, and are pale yellow to green in color. A persimmon-type fruit that needs to be removed surrounds the nuts—the fruit is what often carries the odor that many find so unpleasant. You then need to dry the seeds, crack them, and many recommend boiling them for about 10 minutes, which allows the outer flesh of the nut to detach from the core of the nut. In most cases people don’t eat the inner kernel of walnuts because it is bitter.
Like other types of nuts, ginkgo nuts can cause nut allergies. If you haven’t eaten them in the past, you might want to try some at first. It’s also important to wear gloves when removing the fruit. Some people develop dermatitis from contact with fruit pulp. If you want to try ginkgo but prefer to cut out all that work, you can usually find them canned at Asian grocery stores in the United States.
The ginkgo nuts in Chinese dishes can be added to soups, stews or fried dishes, or the nuts can be eaten individually. It is only recently that ginkgo has come to the attention of most non-Asian Americans, potentially useful in memory retention. In traditional Chinese medicine, ginkgo nuts are considered an aphrodisiac.
Part of the reverence for nut and tree is that these trees are ancient. Scientists believe ginkgo has been around for over 100 million years. It may have provided food for past animals. Eating ginkgo nuts today is truly eating a food that early humans most likely learned to harvest and eat.
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