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Howdy from Belmont.
If you've driven US-90 between Seguin and Gonzales this fall and seen the cracker running at our shop, that was this year's crop on its way to somebody's pie. It's pecan season, and around here that means pecans come in, get cracked, get bagged, and go out the door about as fast as we can keep up.
This is our very first newsletter, so here's what you're in for. Every Monday you'll get a short note from the shop, a story from Texas pecan history, something good to make, and an idea for a day out in Central Texas. Nothing fancy. Think of it as the conversation you'd have at the counter if you stopped by, minus the part where you leave with three more bags than you planned on.
Pecans are about as Texas as it gets
Pecans grew wild along Texas rivers long before anybody drew a border around this place. The people who lived here planned their year around the harvest. Every fall they gathered the nuts, ground them into meal, and pressed them into milk and oil. When winter came and other food got scarce, pecans kept folks fed. They're rich, they keep well, and you don't have to cook them. Hard to beat that.
Our part of the story is a lot younger, but it's ours. Mack has worked Texas pecans since 1989. In 2023 he opened his own shop on US-90 in Belmont, where we buy pecans from growers, crack them, bag them and ship them ourselves. When you order from us, there's no warehouse in the middle. There's just us.
We never got so big that we forgot where we came from. You'll see familiar faces behind the counter, in the back and packing your orders. Some of them are family. Mack's grandson even holds the title of CFO. That's Chief Fun Officer, and from what we can tell, it's a demanding position.
A little Texas pecan history: the river of nuts
Picture Texas in 1528. No roads, no towns, and definitely no H-E-B.
That year a Spanish expedition went badly wrong, and a handful of survivors washed up on the coast near Galveston. One of them was a man named Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca. He spent the next several years living among the Native peoples of Texas, and he's often called the first European to walk across it. He did most of that walking barefoot.
He also became the first European to write about Texas pecans. He described people gathering nuts by the riverbanks every year and living on little else for a couple of months at a time. The Spanish didn't have a word for pecans yet, so he called them nueces, the word for walnuts. Along the border, a lot of folks still call pecans nueces today.
He's said to have named one river "the river of nuts." Most historians think he meant the Guadalupe, the same river that runs through Seguin and Gonzales, a few miles from our shop. So when we tell you these are local pecans, we mean it goes back about 500 years. Georgia may grow a lot of pecans these days, but Texas had them first.
This week's recipe: old-fashioned Texas pralines
French settlers in Louisiana learned about pecans from Native Americans, and it didn't take them long to start making candy. One Frenchman writing in the early 1700s said pralines made with pecans were every bit as good as the almond kind back home. He wasn't wrong.
Texans have been arguing about pralines ever since. Creamy or chewy? Big or small? And is it PRAH-leen or PRAY-leen? We're not touching that last one. Here's a classic version to start your own argument with.
- 1½ cups sugar
- ¾ cup packed brown sugar
- ½ cup whole milk
- 6 tablespoons butter
- 1½ cups McIntosh pecan halves
- 1 teaspoon vanilla
- Line a sheet pan with parchment.
- In a heavy saucepan over medium heat, stir the sugars, milk and butter until they dissolve. Bring the mixture to a boil and cook without stirring until it reaches 238°F, the soft-ball stage.
- Take the pan off the heat. Add the pecans and vanilla, then stir hard for 2 to 3 minutes, until the candy starts to thicken and loses its shine.
- Working quickly, drop spoonfuls onto the parchment. Let them set for about 30 minutes.
A few tips that can save a batch:
- Pick a dry day. Candy gets stubborn about setting when it's humid, and this is Texas.
- Test your thermometer first. Stick it in boiling water. If it doesn't read 212°F, adjust your target by the difference.
- Move fast at the end. If the candy starts setting up in the pot, stir in a spoonful of hot water and keep going.
- If they never set at all, congratulations, you made praline sauce. Pour it over vanilla ice cream and tell everybody you meant to.
With only a handful of ingredients, the pecans are doing most of the work here. Fresh-cracked halves taste like pecans. Old ones taste like the back of the pantry.
Free shipping is here
This is the news we've been waiting to share. Orders of $100 or more now ship free nationwide, and Texas orders ship free at $75.
Thanksgiving is right around the corner, too. If you're the one bringing pie this year (or the one who always says you'll bring pie and shows up with a bag of ice), now's a good time to stock up on fresh-cracked halves and pieces. They keep in the freezer, so you'll be set for Christmas baking too.
Things to do around here: a pecan day trip to Seguin
Seguin calls itself the Pecan Capital of Texas, and it has the statues to prove it. Plural.
Start on the north lawn of the Guadalupe County Courthouse on East Court Street, where the Original World's Largest Pecan has sat since 1962. It held that title for twenty years. Then in 1982, pecan farmers in Brunswick, Missouri, built a bigger one. Seguin did not take that lying down. The town answered with a 16-foot pecan outside the Texas Agricultural Education and Heritage Center, and the rivalry has been settled in Seguin's mind ever since.
Get your picture with both. Then drive 15 minutes east on 90 to Belmont and come see us for a bag of the real thing. We're open Monday through Friday from 8 to 5:30 and Saturday from 8:30 to 3.
On the calendar: Wurstfest runs Nov. 6–15 at Landa Park in New Braunfels, with ten days of German food, music and dancing. It's a fine excuse for a Central Texas weekend, and Belmont is an easy detour on the way home.
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Sign up for the newsletter at mcintoshpecan.com and we'll send you 10% off your first online order. Pick it up free in Belmont, or we'll ship it anywhere in the country. Ordering for Christmas? Get it in by December 10.
Before you go
Did your family have a pecan tree growing up? Or a pie recipe nobody's allowed to change? We'd love to hear about it. Tell us on Facebook, or tell us in person next time you're on 90.
See you next Monday,
Mack and everyone at McIntosh Pecan
14354 US-90 Alt W, Belmont, TX · Mon–Fri 8–5:30, Sat 8:30–3