English Walnuts

English walnuts — the common walnuts you’ll find in any Australian supermarket — have a mild, slightly bitter flavour and a satisfyingly creamy-yet-crunchy texture. Their two-lobed kernels sit inside a hard, round shell that cracks open with a good squeeze from a nutcracker.

They’re enormously versatile in the kitchen: tossed through salads, folded into banana bread, blitzed into pesto, or simply eaten by the handful as a snack. Walnuts pair particularly well with blue cheese, honey, and bitter greens like rocket or radicchio.

Walnuts have been cultivated for thousands of years across Central Asia and the Mediterranean. Despite the name, they likely originated in Persia rather than England — the “English” label stuck because English merchants were the primary traders who brought them to the wider world.