Description
These are 'Sommerton' Almonds from Willunga, Sth Australia. They are the most popular table variety almond we sell - fresh from the cracking machine each week.
Some history:
Almonds are the kernel of the fruit of the almond tree.
There are two main types of almonds - sweet and bitter. The sweet almond is delicate and slightly sweet. Bitter almonds are more strongly flavoured and contain traces of lethal prussic acid when raw. Processed bitter almonds are used to flavour extracts and liqueurs.
Willunga in South Australia was once the heart of our almond industry. Now there's just a handful of growers left. The last almond growers of Willunga are keeping the winter blossom on the trees, including third-generation farmer Tim Parkinson. His father John remembers planting his first trees with his father, in around 1936, when the area was the main almond growing region in South Australia. Nowadays production has shifted to areas where water is more plentiful - like the Riverland, towards the Victorian border, and the Sunraysia area in Victoria. In the old days, everything grown in Willunga went to the South Australian Almond Co-operative, founded in 1944. Now, however, Tim Parkinson's crop of local varieties is delivered direct, stored and cracked to order. The almonds are then roasted, sometimes ground into meal or eaten raw and fresh from the shell. The local almond varieties are known as brownskins - as opposed to the more common, and mostly imported, Californian papershells. There's the Johnson - a very old Australian variety, with big, flat kernels and strong growth lines. It's unusual, slightly bent in shape. It's a good manufacturing variety, ideal for almond meal. The fatter, creamy Somerton, with its smoother skin, is a good table variety.
