How might the Chinese best like to snack on their almonds? Pickled with chili peppers? Wrapped in seaweed like sushi? Or perhaps mixed with donkey hide glue, a substance prized in traditional Chinese medicine?

Those offbeat ideas were among the winners in a student recipe contest sponsored in China by California’s almond industry, which is seeing powerful demand for its products from a country that has begun gobbling up as many American walnuts, pecans and almonds as it can get.

This year, China will emerge as the top foreign buyer of American almonds, more than doubling its purchases from two years ago, according to data from the Almond Board of California. Last year, China was the top foreign buyer of American walnuts, and in 2007, it became the leading export market for pecans. Altogether, China bought $737 million in tree nuts from the United States last year, up from just $89 million five years earlier, according to the United States Department of Agriculture.

“They’ve basically gone from nothing to No. 1 in a relatively short period of time,” said Keith Rigg, of the Minturn Nut Company, an almond grower and exporter in Le Grand, Calif. “It’s really taken off like a rocket.”