Processing pecans

I've been doing a pecan dunkleweizen for several seasons now. The results are quite pleasing, but I have no idea why I need to process the pecans in the way described below before adding to the fermenter at 7 days. I thought perhaps someone here could explain.

1. soak in salt water 24 hours
2. drain, toast in oven till dry
3. soak In vodka 24 hours
4. Drain
5. toast till they begin to smoke
6. Add to fermenter

I speculate that the final toasting is to enhance the flavor, but I have no idea why the salt water or vodka is used first.

Aw, C'mon. Somebody has to know this. Please?

Is the vodka soak added as well or just the pecans?

Just the pecans. I put the pecans in while warm, and they sizzled a bit. Perhaps heating opens up the pores and allows the beer to penetrate and extract more flavor? I swiped the recipie from the following thread and made some adjusments. See post 5. https://www.homebrewtalk.com/showthread.php?t=295301

oops, post 5 said salt water to promote enzymes, vodka to remove oils. I guess I shoulda done my homework before I started this thread Huh?

What kind of enzymes would be promoted by soaking in salt water?

Not sure about the enzymes but I never soaked mine in salt. May be a good idea. I toast 3 times to remove oils.

not sure where you go this process, but if it works awesome. To me it looks like you took 2 options for adding pecans (or any nut that has natural oils in it) to beer and combined them.

no idea the purpose of the salt water soak, i havent seen or heard of that being mentioned before, but all those processes are designed for mostly 1 thing... getting the oil out of the nut so it doesnt end up in your beer and ruin head retention or give an oily mouthfeel.

heating them releases oils (come to think of it, maybe the saltwater soak would help with this too??), oil floats, so when you dump off the salt water and vodka you are getting rid of some of the oil. Not all of it though.

Vodka is usually used as an extracting agent, not a rinse though. People will leave the nuts soaking in vodka for a few weeks then dump the whole thing into the secondary. Some even freeze the vodka mix as the oil floating on top should solidify a little making it easier to remove. I can always taste the vodka when i do anything like this and add the vodka to the beer so i dont.

My way of processing them is heating them several times (325 for 15 min each time) and vaccum sealing them in brown paper bags to extract the oils. Then crush them and add that to the mash. there is no right or wrong way to do this so as long as you dont have a head retention problem, and you are getting the pecan character you want, you are good!

However, from what i have read, most people that have done it both ways, prefer the mash method as opposed to the secondary method for flavor and lack of head retention issues.

EDIT:
just did a littel research on soaking the nuts and apparently it IS a thing, BUT, not sure we need to do it as after we get tis enzymatic process going, you are baking them. http://foodmatters.tv/articles-1/the-benefits-of-soaking-nuts-and-seeds

Kinda sounds like something you want happening IN your mash but i am gonna read further on it. Gonna read up a bit more on it.

Interesting attachment, thanks for sharing. So the soak neutralizes enzyme inhibitors and removes tannins. The salt water WAS very brown when I removed the nuts.