Pine Nuts

Pine nuts are a nutritious snack that can be eaten raw or roasted. They can be added to salads, sprinkled on top of hummus, and blended up as part of pesto and other sauces.

Pine nuts are grown predominantly in the Northern Hemisphere in Asia, Europe, and North America and are also known as pinyon, pignoli, pignolia, pinon, and pignon (1).

Different species, environments, and regions contribute to slight variations in pine nuts’ shape and nutritional composition. Asian pine nuts are short, while European varieties are long and thin.

The small, sweet, teardrop-shaped nut comes with a hefty price tag due to the time and labor involved in its harvest.

It can take up to 25 years for pine trees to start producing edible pine nuts and significantly longer for production to reach its peak. Pine nuts then need to be extracted as seeds, and the second shells must be removed before they’re ready to eat.