This is from the Old Farmer's Almanac
https://www.almanac.com/how-prepare-and-cook-acorns?trk_msg=8U6R05VNTIB453RVUJD96BT6MC&trk_contact=JSBL2F00HHTI9QMREDTD8C6PCK&trk_sid=LKILFGTUU78KP7JR7R2LNL5JLG&trk_link=EI7TCJQ6R074N61AUU5OOAKEI0&lctg=&utm_source=Listrak&utm_medium=Email&utm_term=How+to+Prepare+and+Cook+Acorns+(read+more)&utm_campaign=Companion+Daily&utm_content=Almanac.com. I've never tried it other than leaching a few acorns 50 years ago when I was in the Boy Scouts, so I can't say what the finished product is like. Likewise, I've never tried the recipies included at the end (I ain't that hungry yet). But I just might go out and try leaching acorns again for the hell of it.
How to Prepare and Cook Acorns
A Step-by-Step Guide to Preparing and Cooking with Acorns
August 25, 2022
Have you ever wondered if the squirrels might be onto something? In fact, they are! Acorns are extremely nutritious and readily available in nature, making them a healthy addition to many recipes. Here?s how to prepare and cook acorns!
Why acorns? They are incredibly nutritious, offering healthy levels of carbohydrates, protein, and fiber. Surprisingly, they are also a good source of Vitamins A and C.
Plus, they have a wonderful rich, nutty taste. Also, why not? It?s fun to forage and try making something adventurous.
Acorns have been a staple of diets around the world and across cultures, including among some Native Americans.
While most folks use acorns to make a nutrient-rich, nutty-flavored flour, you can also eat acorns as roasted nuts (they are a lot like chestnuts). See more ideas below!
Where and When to Find Acorns
Acorns come from oak trees, which can be found across North America. Oak trees are easily identifiable?they?re the ones with all the acorns around them! Jokes aside, oaks have fairly distinctive leaves and bark; look up which species of oak trees are common in your area to know exactly what signs to look for.
Acorns are typically harvested between September and November, when they fall from the trees and become easily accessible to deer, squirrels, and resourceful humans.
How to Collect Acorns
When gathering acorns, look for brown, fully mature acorns that still have their caps, as those without caps are more susceptible to infestation by worms and other critters.
Green acorns are not yet mature and shouldn?t be used. If you?re willing to wait, consider harvesting acorns this year and storing them in a cool, dry place until next fall, when they?ll be fully dried and easier to work with.
Acorns
How to Wash Acorns
Give acorns a quick rinse in cool water. Place them in a pot or bowl and fill it with water, then remove and dispose of any floating acorns, as they have likely gone bad.
Place the acorns in a colander and run them under the tap for a minute or two to dislodge any loose dirt or hitchhiking bugs.
Set the colander aside to let the acorns air-dry, or simply dry them by hand with a dish towel.
Remove the shells and caps from your acorns with a nutcracker (or a hammer, if necessary). Do not eat the raw meat of the acorns yet.
How to Leach Acorns
Acorns contain bitter-tasting tannins, so you must prepare, treat, and cook the nuts before you eat them. It sounds like a pain, but it?s really not that difficult.
Start two pots of water boiling. Drop the raw, shell-less acorns into one pot and boil until the water is the color of strong tea. Strain the nuts through a colander and drop the strained nuts into the second pot of boiling water. Discard the dark water from the first pot, then refill it and bring the water to a boil again. Repeat the process without interruption (do not let the acorns cool) until the water boils clear. This may take an hour or more, depending on the variety of acorn.
Alternatively, you can soak the raw acorns in cold water to leach the tannins out. Change the water when it turns a darker color. This process may take several days, depending on how long it takes for all the tannins to leach out of the acorn meat.
To avoid rotting, it?s very important that the acorns dry fully. Spread tannin-free acorns to dry on cookie sheets in a warm place. If it is hot out, lay the cookie sheets in the sun. Or, you could put them in an oven set to ?warm.? You can also put the acorns in a dehydrator set on low heat.
Eating Roasted Acorns
Making acorn flour isn?t the only way you can enjoy acorns. Here?s how to roast the nuts:
Preheat your oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit.
Pour the acorns into a single layer on an ungreased, rimmed cookie sheet.
Cook the nuts for about 60 minutes or until they turn a chocolate brown color.
Remove the acorns from the oven and let them cool. Salt to taste.
How to Grind Acorns for Flour
When partially dry, coarse grind a few acorns at a time in a blender. Spread the ground acorns to dry on cookie sheets, then grind again in a blender. Repeat until you are left with a flour- or cornmeal-like substance.
You can also freeze your fresh acorn meal. Store dried flour in jars in the fridge.
Acorn Recipe Ideas
Mix up cooked acorns with raisins or other dried fruit to make a trail mix.
Substitute acorns for chestnuts in baking recipes.
Use acorn flour in bread, cake, pancakes, and more! Try this acorn flour flatbread recipe (similar to tortilla)- see below.
Or, try this acorn flour honey cake, which tastes a little like gingerbread cake- see below.
The flour also makes an excellent pasta dough when mixed with regular flour.
How about adding acorn flour to a pancake recipe for that nutty taste and nutrition?
Acorn Pancakes Recipe
This recipe adapted from Sharon Hendricks. Source: Texas A&M University AgriLife Extension
Ingredients:
One egg
1 tsp. salad oil
1 tsp. honey or sugar
? cup leached and ground acorns
? cup cornmeal
? cup whole wheat or white flour
2 tsp. double action baking powder
? tsp. salt
? cup milk
Instructions:
Break egg into bowl and add all ingredients, beating to create a batter. If batter is too thick, thin with additional milk. Pour batter onto hot, greased griddle and cook slowly until brown. Flip to brown opposite side. Serve with butter and syrup or jam?and enjoy!
ACORN FLATBREADS (from
https://honest-food.net/foraging-recipes/acorns-nuts-and-other-wild-starches/acorn-flatbreads/ )
This is a recipe based off the Italian flatbread piadina, which is a specialty of Romagna and is essentially an Italian flour tortilla. What I?ve done is sub in some acorn flour for the wheat flour; the acorn flour makes the breads dark and nutty. If you don?t have acorn flour, chestnut flour is an excellent substitute.
You really want that nutty flavor, but don?t think adding more acorn flour would be better here, though. Acorn flour has no gluten and so will simply disintegrate if you try to make an acorn-only piadina.
Most Old World cultures that use acorns ? Spain, Italy and North Africa primarily ? use them as a ?filler? when wheat flour is scarce. I just like the taste and want to include wild starches in my diet.
Makes 6-8 piadine, depending on size
2 ? cups unbleached all-purpose or bread flour
? cup acorn flour
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
3 tablespoons olive oil
A scant cup of water (7/8 cup to be exact)
Sift the flours and salt together in a large bowl and make a well in the center.
Add the olive oil and water in the center of the well and swirl to combine with a finger or two. When the dough gets shaggy, start bringing it together with your hands, then knead it on a floured surface for 5-8 minutes. Use a bit more flour if it is too loose.
Lightly coat with more olive oil, wrap in plastic and set aside for at least an hour. This dough can hold in the fridge for a day.
Take the dough out of the fridge if you?ve put it in there and let it warm to room temperature. Get a griddle or a well-oiled cast iron pan hot over medium heat.
Cut the dough into equal parts; I?d suggest between 6-8. Roll them out one at a time with a roller and then your hands ? they need not be perfect, as this is a rustic bread. You want them thin, though, about 1/8 inch.
Lightly oil the griddle and cook the piadine one or two at a time for 2-3 minutes, or until it begins to get nice and brown. Flip and cook for another 1-2 minutes.
Keep them warm in towels while you make the rest. Serve with some cheese, fresh herbs ? green onions are excellent with this ? and some high-quality olive oil.
ACORN CAKE AND ACORNS AROUND THE WORLD
By Hank Shaw
https://honest-food.net/acorn-cake-and-acorns-around-the-world/Jump to Recipe Comment
Acorn flour cake
One of the first questions I had as I began researching acorns years ago was what do other groups do with them? The literature is dominated by roughly hewn recipes from either various American Indian groups or hippies. Neither, quite frankly, are recipes I am overly jazzed about.
Oaks live all over the world, from Asia to North Africa to Europe to North America. And where there are acorns, people have eaten them. They have their own methods, too.
Turns out the acorn-eatingest people in the world right now are the Koreans. If you go to a good Asian market, there is a good chance you will find acorn flour and acorn noodles, which look just like soba noodles. From what I can tell the noodles are eaten in the same way soba noodles are; and yes, they also appear to a lesser extent in Japanese cuisine.
Any Korean food experts out there? My question is whether acorn flour and noodles are considered low-class or poor people?s food. Because that is their stigma everywhere else in the world, best I can tell.
This is interesting. A certain set of scholars think that sometime around 10,000 years ago, humans ? who ate acorns with aplomb at the time ? grew in population to the point where they were overeating them and threatening the oaks. Great big oaks that gave sweet acorns would be in demand and might even be fought over, as the Indians did in parts of California.
So with too few acorns and a burgeoning population, the scholars theorize that the people looked to wild grains as a secondary source of vital carbohydrates. And carbs are key to a hunter-gathering society; remember the Forager?s Dilemma?
Turned out these wild grains ? emmer wheat, spelt, barley and rye ? domesticate easily, are annuals so can be planted anywhere if your tribal group moves around, and give easily collectible seed that is lighter than a big ole? bag of acorns, which have a pretty long lag time from acorn to acorn-bearing oak. And good luck moving a giant oak when invaders arrive, but you can flee with some barley seed and plant again next spring.
Acorns, which are, for the most part, bitter and need to be water-leached at least once or twice to be palatable, fell by the wayside. Acorns also lack gluten, which is vital in making bread items stick together. Wheat, barley and rye all have at least a little gluten. So acorns, and in Europe chestnuts, which have a similar consistency, fell to the status of emergency or famine foods. A fixation with whitened wheat flour furthered this. Black bread was for peasants, and acorn cooks up dark. It?s the sugars in them.
Consequently, you need to search far and wide for acorn recipes in European circles. North African Berbers do use them, however. I corresponded with Paula Wolfert, who wrote the great Couscous and Other Good Food from Morocco, which is the sine qua non of Moroccan cookbooks. Wolfert told me that Berbers will sometimes make couscous from acorn flour. Fascinating. I have heard that Italians will make acorn flour pasta, too. I developed my own recipe for acorn flour pasta here.
Another source on Moroccan food tells me they also roast and salt acorns and serve them like roasted chestnuts. Linda Berzok, who wrote American Indian Food, says that the Indians around Tuscon, Arizona, sell roasted acorns from the Emory Oak, which are so sweet they don?t need leaching. An expert on Mexican food says in Chihuahua they do the same thing; makes sense, as the Emory Oak lives there, too.
Back in Europe, acorns from the cork oak are pretty sweet, and those that the famed jamon iberico pigs eat, the bellotas, reputedly need no leaching. Janet from The Old Foodie sent me a recipe for acorn bread from an English book written in 1802 that is a little like the acorn flatbreads I made last week, although with no wheat flour. These English acorn cakes are more like acorn meal hamburger patties cooked in embers.
In Europe, the thread running through most acorn and chestnut cookery is that they are fillers when wheat flour is scarce. Considering the reverence many groups have for wheat it?s pretty easy to see why anything they need to fill out a bread recipe would be seen as an adulteration, not an enhancement.
There is one European food that uses acorns that isn?t stigmatized: It?s an acorn cake. The Italians make a chestnut flour cake called castagnaccio, but it contains no leaveners. I imagine it?s like a hockey puck. So I Frenchified it and added beaten egg whites, baking powder and baking soda. I baked it in little ramekins and topped it with powdered sugar.
Now I am not a cake maker. The cake itself was really crumbly ? too crumbly for my taste. But the taste of the cake was amazing! It was a dead ringer for a gingerbread cake, only there was no gingerbread spices in it at all! I was shocked. All that?s in it is acorn flour, eggs, honey, olive oil, sugar and a pinch of salt. How did it get to be like gingerbread? Must be the acorns.
Acorn or Chestnut Flour Cake
I found a version of a chestnut cake like this in an old Gourmet magazine, and this acorn cake recipe is a riff off that. These are lovely done in a 9-inch springform pan, but are equally good in buttered ramekins. Be sure to use a small circle of parchment paper on the bottom of the ramekin, and butter both sides. This will help you get the little cakes out easier. Oh, and don?t forget they rise, so don?t fill them too high.
Prep Time 20 mins
Cook Time 30 mins
Total Time 50 mins
Course: DessertCuisine: French Servings: 4 people Calories: 686kcal Author: Hank Shaw
Ingredients
▢? cup olive oil
▢1/2 cup acorn or chestnut flour
▢1/2 cup cake flour or all-purpose wheat flour
▢? cup toasted and chopped pine nuts (optional)
▢? teaspoon baking powder
▢? teaspoon baking soda
▢1/4 teaspoon salt
▢3 separated eggs
▢? cup honey
▢? cup sugar
▢Confectioner?s sugar for dusting
▢Butter for greasing pans
Instructions
Grease the springform pan or ramekins. Preheat oven to 350?F.
Mix the acorn flour, wheat flour, baking soda and powder and salt in a bowl. In the bowl of a stand mixer, or in another large bowl, beat the egg yolks, oil, honey and 2 tablespoons of sugar together until it looks like caramel. Mix in the dry ingredients.
In another bowl, add the egg whites and just a pinch of salt and beat into soft peaks. Add the remaining sugar and beat a bit more, so the whites are reaching the firm peak stage.
Fold this into the dough a little at a time gently. Pour, or really gently place, the dough into the ramekins (remember they will rise!) or the springform pan. Using a rubber spatula flatten out the top and place in the oven as fast as you can.
Bake for about 30 minutes. After 20 minutes, watch for burning, as acorn flour browns faster than chestnut flour. Remove from the oven, let rest 5 minutes, then turn out onto a rack to cool.
When they have cooled for a good 15-20 minutes or so, dust with the confectioner?s sugar.
Nutrition
Calories: 686kcal | Carbohydrates: 83g | Protein: 9g | Fat: 37g | Saturated Fat: 5g | Cholesterol: 123mg | Sodium: 340mg | Potassium: 184mg | Fiber: 3g | Sugar: 54g | Vitamin A: 195IU | Vitamin C: 11mg | Calcium: 53mg | Iron: 2mg
