Recall

Monday morning at five o’clock, we were listening to the news. The reporter said, “We have another food recall to tell you about. This time it is pistachios.” I chuckled a little. In the last three days we had eaten our share of pistachios and on top of that, we had five pounds on the dining room table.

Char and I took a trip to Alamogordo, New Mexico. This wasn’t our first choice but the weather in South Dakota sounded iffy. I brought up the idea of going to Alamogordo to see the pistachio groves. Char looked at me, smiled, and said that would be fine. I think she was humoring me. She probably wanted to say, “Hey, you wanted to spend nine hours in the car to look at trees planted in a straight line that’s fine with me.”

Vineyards, groves, hay fields, orchards, farms, and plantations have always fascinated me. Now I’ll admit most people probably don’t get excited about those things but a pistachio grove is worth the trip.

There are two pistachio groves and one pecan grove near Alamogordo and we stopped at all three. Eagle Ranch and McGinn’s grow pistachios, the Nut House raises pecans.

Eagle Ranch was the first pistachio grove in New Mexico. It is now the largest. It’s 85 acres in size and has roughly 12,000 pistachio trees. They also have 18,000 grape vines from which a variety of wines are made including one with a pistachio taste called, Pistachio Rose.

Here are the pistachio trees and just like Char thought – they are planted in a straight line. They usually plant the trees on a 17’ x 17’ spacing.

Harvest is around September 10th. Following harvest, the hull (called the epicarp) needs to be removed within 24 hours or the inner shell will become stained. After the epicarp is removed, the nuts are power washed four times. Then they are sorted by hand twice. One sorting removes rocks, sticks, and other debris. They also do a in-shell removal, this includes nuts that have not started to open or are stained.

The in-shell removals go into the sheller. Here the nutmeat is removed from the shell.

Pistachios still in the shell are roasted in this machine. After a little roasting they come out of the oven, flavoring is added, then back into the roaster.

This machine is used to add flavoring. There is a wide range of flavors including salted, lemon lime, red chili, green chili, garlic and others. Only one flavor a day is done and the machine needs to be thoroughly cleaned.

Then we were off to McGinn’s pistachio tree ranch.

They also offer a variety of pistachio flavors.

These are some of the younger trees on the ranch. These trees start producing nuts in the fourth or fifth year and yield one-half a pound. At maturity, which is in 15 to 20 years, each tree will produce around seventy pounds of pistachios

Now is where my kids need to pay attention. This is the world’s largest pistachio. It is a monument to Thomas McGinn who passed away in 2007. Mr. McGinn was the founder of the Pistachio Tree Ranch. The monument was conceived and put in place by his kids. I don’t need anything this big but - a little something (about half this size) would be nice.

So, on Monday morning when I heard the pistachio recall involved California pistachio I was a little relieved. Not that it mattered, I had already made up my mind I was going to eat the pistachios and drink the wine.