Meet the Ingredient: Soaking Nuts, A Short History and Ways to Enjoy Activated Almonds

November 2, 2026

Putting food in water before cooking or eating it is a long-established step in many kitchens, and it is applied to different foods for quite different reasons. Today some brands describe soaked-and-dried nuts as "activated". This is a look at where soaking comes from, what it does in food-science terms, and what the research on nuts has actually found.

Soaking in the kitchen: some old and new parallels

Dried beans are the everyday example. Dry beans hold only 12 to 14% moisture, and soaking lets them roughly double in size. National Geographic, reporting on the science, cites a 2022 study in Heliyon finding that soaking often cuts cooking time by 20 to 38%. Researchers also note that some compounds leach into the water, which is why cooks are often advised to discard it.

Other traditions use water to remove something unwelcome. Native Californian communities, among them the Hupa, Pomo, Karuk and Yurok, leached acorn flour with water to wash out bitter tannins before eating it, as the Hearst Museum of Anthropology describes. In Mexico and Central America, maize has long been cooked and steeped in limewater, a process called nixtamalisation. One review dates it to about 1500 BCE, and the FAO describes lime-cooked maize as the basis of tortillas in Mexico and Central America. The same review reports that the process helps remove the grain's outer layer, improves the dough and reduces phytic acid.

Almonds have their own watery history. The food-history site Coquinaria notes that in the Middle Ages, when dairy, eggs and meat were banned during Lent, almond milk was an important substitute for milk. It was made by mixing ground almonds with liquid, letting the mixture stand and straining it.

What soaking does to a nut

The simplest effect is physical. As the beans above show, soaking lets a seed take up water, and drying removes it again. What changes is texture and, with a salted soak, seasoning. That is the case for the almonds in our range: organic almonds soaked in salted water for several hours, then dried, with a light saltiness running through them (0.6g of salt per 100g).

The phytate question

Most of the debate concerns phytate, the salt of phytic acid. A review from the Technical University of Denmark's National Food Institute describes it as a store of phosphorus and minerals in seeds, present in all of them, and broken down by an enzyme (phytase) as a seed germinates. In nuts it ranges from 0.1% to 9.4%, and the review notes that almonds are at the top of that range. Because phytate has an affinity for minerals and trace elements, the review says it can interfere with their absorption in the gut. The same review reports that phytate can be reduced by soaking, but under conditions that suit phytase, which it gives as about 55°C and a mildly acidic pH of 4.5 to 5.0, over 12 to 16 hours.

Phytate is also at the centre of claims that soaking nuts makes them more nutritious. The research behind those claims had come from legumes and grains; the 2020 study below says none had tested nuts.

What was found when nuts were tested

In 2020, a team of researchers published a study in Food Chemistry titled "Does 'activating' nuts affect nutrient bioavailability?" They soaked whole and chopped almonds, hazelnuts, peanuts and walnuts in four ways: untreated, 12 hours in a salt solution, 4 hours in a salt solution, and 12 hours in plain water. They measured phytate by high-performance liquid chromatography and minerals by mass spectrometry.

The results were modest. Phytate levels ranged from about 12% lower to about 10% higher than in the untreated nuts. Soaking generally reduced the concentration of minerals, particularly in chopped nuts, and did not improve the ratio of phytate to minerals. The authors concluded that their results do not support the claim that activating nuts increases nutrient bioavailability.

That is one study, on four nuts and a few sets of soaking times, and it measured composition rather than what people absorb, so it is not the last word. Still, its authors found no support for the claim. For that reason we describe our almonds by what we do to them, and make no claim about absorption or digestibility.

Tannins and the walnut skin

Tannins are the other talking point. The thin, papery skin of a walnut carries tannins and catechin, and a flavour chemist quoted by the California walnut industry says they are behind its astringent, mouth-drying taste. He estimates that blanching walnuts in water would extract 92 to 98% of the tannins. That describes blanching rather than a salt soak, so it should not be read as a measurement of what activating does, but it shows why water has long been the cook's tool for taming bitter seeds.