Each nut is roasted lovingly by hand at Wichita’s Nifty Nut House. Go behind the scenes
On a recent Wednesday morning in Wichita, customers strolled around Nifty Nut House and searched its walls of nuts, candy, gum and other sweet treats the local favorite is known for.
Meanwhile, while customers were chatting with workers and deciding what candy to buy, right next door in a more industrial setting, owner (or “head nut”) Steve Jahn was busy roasting more than 100 pounds of cashew nuts.
Jahn said that he has roasted more than 1 million pounds of nuts himself.
“We roast about every day,” Jahn said. “We will probably cook about 600 pounds a day … six to 800.”
The store uses a batch roaster, which was purchased in 1985. When purchased, the roaster was called a two-bag roaster and was designed to hold two burlap bags of peanuts, which is roughly 220 pounds.
On average, the roaster roasts 200 pounds of nuts at a time. It can hold 60 pounds of oil.
While there are certain steps to follow each time, every batch is always a little different than the last.
“We roast them until they’re done,” Jahn said. “It’s not a time thing, it’s not a temperature, it’s really sight … every one of them is kind of a custom-roasted batch.”
While the roasting machine is in a separate building than the store, that hasn’t always been the case. In a previous space, customers could watch the process as they were shopping. But the space got tight, which led to the change.
“What we did lose was the smell, because when we roast it you can smell it,” Jahn said. “People used to say, ‘Yeah, just go into Nifty and inhale.’”
Nifty Nut House has been a staple in Wichita since its opening in 1937. It has moved several times, but now has its home on 527 S. Francis, which the shop moved into in 2018.
“Wichita has been wonderful to us,” Jahn said.
The store has about 30 employees, but during the busy holiday season, it upgrades that number to 60 to 80 employees.
During the holiday season, from October through December, Jahn said, the store sells about 100,000 to 120,000 gift boxes.
“[We] roast them all by hand, we pack them by hand, we wrap them by hand,” Jahn said. “And we typically would do that in about a six-week period.”
Jahn said the local favorite during the holiday season is the fancy mix, but they do several combos with different types of nuts.
The steps of roasting nuts at Nifty Nut House
The roaster, which also happens to be in the store’s previous shop space, measures approximately 44 inches in length and 30 inches in width. The basket where the nuts are roasted is 14 inches deep, Jahn said.
To roast a batch of nuts, first the nuts are dumped into a large bucket. On that specific Wednesday, Jahn was roasting a batch of cashew nuts.
That bucket is then automatically lifted up and poured into the basket, which is lowered into coconut oil.
“It just makes things buttery, makes it good,” Jahn said.
The oil is usually heated up to 280, but that temperature depends on the roaster and the needs of that batch.
“If you get too much hotter … they’ll get too dark, and in our opinion they’re burned,” Jahn said.
The average batch usually takes about 12 minutes to roast, but the person roasting checks on the color of the batch frequently through the process, as well as mixing it with a paddle.
Once the person roasting decides the color of the nuts is to their liking, the batch is then lifted up and poured out of the bucket, and then covered with flour salt.
“It’s kind of like popcorn salt. It’s not flavored, but it’s very fine,” Jahn said.
After the person roasting mixes the batch to make sure the salt is evenly distributed, the batch is then pushed down toward the drying table of the roaster where fans are turned on underneath the batch.
Then, the batch is all done, and the tempting smell of the salty roasted nuts is strong enough to fill the small space.
“Nuts are very nutritious, they’re high calorie [and] high fat,” Jahn said. “They are pretty oily, themselves, meaning [they have] a lot of fat and that’s just the nature of nuts .... a handful give you a lot of nutritional value. And it’s a lot better for you than a bag of chips or a piece of toast.”
If you want to give the roasted nuts a try yourself, Nifty Nut House is open from 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Monday through Friday and 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Saturday. The store is closed Sundays.
