The Jolly Fox
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Purdy’s Macadamia Nut Farm & Molokai Pt. 2
After my dad and I visited the beautiful Kumu Farms and filled our bellies, we headed out in our rental to explore the remainder of Molokai. We drove as far around the island as we could and took many roads inland in between.
When we headed inland, we found Purdy’s Macadamia Nut Farm. Family run for over 30 years, the macadamia nut trees all around Purdy’s farm have been growing wild there for over 90 years. The farmers wait for the nuts to fall to the ground and then rake them up for harvest. We met a wonderful woman named Mikyla, who gave my dad, myself and a sweet couple from Alaska the low down on macadamias.
We learned that macadamia nuts have 2 shells; an outer hull and then another brown shell inside that hull. From there, you can try to crack open the nut to taste a truly “raw” macadamia. I never realized that macadamias are typically sun-dried before they are sold as raw or then roasted and sold that way. In their truly raw state, they are moist and have the texture of fresh coconut.
Cracking the nuts is usually done one of two ways:
1. You use this old fashioned device with a crank
2. You use a foam donut, large, flat rock or concrete and a hammer
We also got a chance to walk around a bit and meet the sweetest kitties, see unripe mangos on their way to being delicious someday, macadamia trees with blossoms and nuts, the harvested nuts laid out to dry in he sun, and saw bunches of coconuts.
What I forgot to snap pictures of were the tasting! We sampled all of the raw and sun-dried, roasted and un-roasted that we could eat, raw coconut with a choice of dipping it in farm-fresh macadamia blossom honey (holistic, humane, unheated, all natural) as well as an amazing honey mustard made with the honey just mentioned. It was amazing. This was probably my favorite experience on Molokai and it is a must-visit if you ever travel there.
In my next post, I’ve got a recipe for Hawaiian Papaya-Pineapple Crisp with papayas from Kumu Farms and macadamia nuts in the topping from Purdy’s!
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