Good news! It's early April, which means that area gourmet retailers should be getting their limited supply of pignoli retinosa, more commonly known as miniature pine nuts.
So tiny they can scarcely be seen by the human eye—the picture at left shows one magnified 10x with a cantilevered Incandenza kitchen microscope—the little nuggets have a subtle taste that is notoriously difficult to describe. "Nutty" seems to be the most common adjective, with "piney" sometimes appended as an afterthought.
But what the micro-nuts lack in size and flavor, they more than compensate in expense and esoterica. Harvested from baby bonsai pine cones during late March's brief window of "pine-nut winter," when the sap is uncharacteristically limpid, hydroponic pignoli are extracted by tweezers using a miniature shaker that jiggles the tiny trees until the nuts fall harmlessly into miniature pine-nut tarpaulins.
The cost of a single ounce of pignoli retinosa: $400. Indeed, the eyebrow-raising price is said to cause consternation among farmers who gambled instead on flyspeck-beet futures. But what do they add to a dish? Evidence is inconclusive.
"I sliced three into 1/8" slices, milk-blanched and rinsed them three times, then let them cool to room temperature," reads an entry on Alinea at Home, but it does not describe the nuts further. Elinor Acamende, spokesperson for Emperor's New Farms of Kenoga, Wisconsin, one of the nation's leading micro-nut suppliers, suggests that their true value isn't the taste they bring to a dish, but rather their ability to absorb the taste of any dish.
"Their true value isn't the taste they bring to a dish," Acamende explains, "but rather their ability to absorb the taste of any dish."
Whole Foods apparently does not carry pignoli retinosa. Instead, it stocks the common pine nut, pignoli's heftier, less refined sibling. Nevertheless, the first precious micro-nut shipments should be arriving soon at Middle Tennessee specialty retailers. Look for them wherever impractically tiny, exorbitantly priced, flavorfully negligible foodstuffs are sold.
