Gross. Credit: Wikipedia Commons

49 replies on “Am I the Only One Who Can’t Stand Brazil Nuts?”

  1. They’re the Red Delicious of nuts: they’re big and superficially appealing, but they’re sorely deficient in both texture and flavor. I’m not opposed to them, they’re just… uninteresting.

  2. These are the worst in a mixed nuts mixture. They always get in the way of the good stuff – Cashews, Almonds…hell, even Walnuts.

    Brazil Nuts = Nasty Nuts.

  4. Brazil nuts are disgusting. If brazilwood and the tree for which the country is named weren’t so lovely, I’d be sad for its citizens and their unfortunately named land.

  5. Brazil nuts are good — but only if they are pre-shelled. Those damn shells are a pain!

    They’re so good, they are worth the radioactive radium!

    From wikipedia:

    Brazil nuts also contain small amounts of radioactive radium. Although the amount of radium is very small, about 1–7 pCi/g (40–260 Bq/kg), and most of it is not retained by the body, this is 1,000 times higher than in other foods. According to Oak Ridge Associated Universities, this is not because of elevated levels of radium in the soil, but due to “the very extensive root system of the tree.”

  6. Brazil nuts taste like soap with a slightly nutty flavor. Yet at the same time its size makes sure to spread said flavor over all portions of the tongue, its disgusting.

    Macadamia, now THERE’S a nut.

  7. What everyone else said! Except for COMTE, cause I can’t even think of what that might be… (frown…still thinking…)

    Brazil nuts are like Lima beans: If Lima beans are like chalk wrapped in a wet paper towel, Brazil nuts are like wax wrapped in tissue paper. Maybe we should avoid food that is named after places in South America?

  13. Ironically enough, I just spent my morning composing a poem about my love of Brazil nuts

    COMTE – I think your grandfather and my mother have a lot in common — it took me YEARS to not hear that term when I looked at Brazil nuts

  14. Well, let’s take a trip to the snacks/nuts aisle of the supermarket. Let’s see here… jars of peanuts, cans of almonds, a few bags of pistachios, some Macadamias… nope, not seeing any Brazil nuts. Face facts, the only thing that these things are for is to add weight and volume to the cans of mixed nuts.

  17. I can’t vote because none of the options apply. I’m with #1. They look good, but are indeed rather boring. I have seen brazil nuts on a torte – all shellacked and glistening along with other nuts – where they were somewhat more appealing.

    Anyway, aren’t we supposed to support the use of brazil nuts? Natural rain forest agricultural and all?

    Andy Rooney once divided up a can of mixed nuts into little mounds of each component. Brazil nuts were the cheapest nut (believe it or not) per pound and were fairly represented in the mix (there were more peanuts than anything else). Pecans were the most expensive nut per pound, and the can contained only a few little fragments.

  19. I think I recall some people calling brazil nuts what Comte has remembered. I grew up in the South (and not even the Deep South) and that racist term was reserved in my neck of the woods for little chocolate candies filled with coconut – sort of like a chocolate-covered coconut bonbon. You got them at Sears (when Sears had a candy and nuts department), and get this – you’d walk up to the salesperson and say (without a hint of shame), “Gimme a 1/2 pound of ****** ****.” That was maybe 1961?

    I cringe thinking about that now.

  21. And thank you @2 for addressing the walnut issue. They’re too often an unwelcome intrusion into dishes as some lame attempt to “jazz it up” (a designation that should specifically refer to adding bacon, for the record). Walnuts don’t quite live the unforgivable “bland now—but wait, soon they’ll be rancid!” lifestyle of the brazil nut, but they are the dust old lady purse-candy of nuts.

  22. Huh, my mother tells me everyone called ’em nigger toes when she was growing up, out in Gresham, Oregon (this was in the mid ’50s, early ’60s). It wasn’t until she was a bit older and she moved to Portland that they became brazil nuts. I guess it’s a bit of a relic from the PNW’s infrequently spoken of racist history.

  23. I wonder if Brazil nuts contain some substance that some people can taste and others can’t. They always seem taste a little like mildew to me. Maybe the people who like them can’t taste em.

  24. @24:

    Interesting. That would have been the same time my mom & grandparents lived in Tillamook, so perhaps it’s a local thing? (Although, given the number of responses, my guess is it is/was in much more widespread usage.)

  26. @25 – they’re really fatty so they turn faster than most nuts. Could be you’ve have a few bad…er, badder ones and permanently associate them with that taste. Kinda like walnuts encapsulate the taste of “stale” to me.

  27. I’m a South Dakotan native (by birth, I mean, not by ancestry) and my mom once told me that some people call them that, but that I never should. So it’s not just a PNW thing.

    I like them fine, but my sister is allergic. And by extension, she’s allergic to some soy milk, because it’s sometimes made from GMO soybeans with Brazil nut genes. So uhh… watch out for that, @20.

  28. @25- I never heard that phrase until I was in my late 20s and living in Boston, MA. And I heard it from a 60 year old Turkish guy.

  30. @24. & 30 i never heard that phrase neither till my husband told me his grandmother, who lived in the skagit valley, used to call them that ( iwas in my mid 30’s at the time ) the same grandmother who warned him to stay away from the black girls when he moved to seattle. said ‘the black girls ‘would be nothing but trouble’.. yeah uh huh …ummm..anydangways i can take em or leave em but i stopped buying mixed nuts cause they never give me enough cashews. cain’t get enough cashews..

  34. Always disappointing to reach into a bowl of mixed nuts and end up with a bunch of brazil nuts in your hand. Not gross, just disappointing. If there’s a more uncompelling nut out there, I haven’t seen it.

  38. I grew up in Detroit and I have heard them called nigger toes. In fact, I have heard black folks call them nigger toes. Many times. That said, I actually like them. I think they taste like butter.

  39. I’m with @40 on the nomenclature, both from very early years in Delaware and elementary school years in Utah but we also read Huckleberry Finn in the early 60’s without flinching, too. Times change. These nuts taste “dusty” to me and are not my favorites (last to go).

  40. Oh, gads. The toe thing. The first time someone told me that I lost the will to live in a world where such a thing could be even thought, much less said, much less said to a child.

    Now I have to block it out again or I will not get out of bed tomorrow.

  43. As a child in upstate NY, Brazils were my favorite nut. Sometime in my 30’s I lost my taste for them and now I actually pick them and the Hazel nuts out of the deluxe mix and leave them for my husband and father, (who is also from NY and introduced me to the ‘naughty nickname’ when I was about 10 yrs. old).

  44. Nice… I thought the n-toes term (which I never heard, but I grew up with leftie parents in SoCal) would be the most disturbing thing in the thread, til I got to “my husband and father, who…” I think/hope those are two separate people.

  48. I hate ’em, but my husband loves ’em, so that works out. We then fight over the cashews and pecans, eat the almonds next and the hazelnuts last. (We’re spoiled and buy the deluxe mixed nuts without peanuts). BTW, his grandfather from upstate NY also called them n-word toes, so it must just be a (sad) generational thing.

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