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Reconsider the acorn for a moment. The “oak nut” falls to the ground by the thousands, in nearly every state in the nation, and in scores of shapes and sizes. You probably walked past several today. Acorns are all around us, yet rare are the people who can say they’ve ever eaten them. Eating acorns is even uncommon among dedicated foragers.
Oh I know what you’re thinking: They’re poisonous. Intolerably bitter. Flavorless. Too much work to shell. Too much work to process. Not worth the effort. Mealy.
None of this is really true, unless pre-packaged meals are your idea of a grand dinner. And if you’re that lazy you are in the wrong corner of the Internet and should probably leave. Making acorns good to eat is far easier than many other cooking tasks we do cheerfully on a weekend, and takes far less time than you might think.
I processed more than 10 pounds of acorns one morning while watching college football. Without missing a play, I had them ready to eat by the end of the game. I could have processed twice that amount in about the same time. Suffice to say that anyone who has ever made homemade pasta, butchered a deer, filleted a fish, braised beef short ribs, baked and decorated a layer cake or planted a garden bed can process acorns.
Why more people don’t eat acorns is no mystery: It is a plot perpetrated on us humans by a vast squirrel conspiracy, aided and abetted by blue jays and their magpie collaborators. OK, maybe not. But we can learn something by watching squirrels.
Squirrels don’t bury every acorn they find, you know. Scientists observing squirrel behavior back East noticed something unusual. The fuzzy varmints would seek out white oak acorns and gorge themselves on them, then dash off to find the acorns of other oaks, mainly the red oak. Powered by a meal of white oak acorns, the squirrels would then spend hours burying red oak acorns in the ground. Why?
Turns out white oak acorns are extremely low in the bitter tannins that give all acorns such a bad name. Red oak acorns are high in tannins. But tannins are water soluble. So by burying them, the squirrel hid the acorn from the stealing blue jays (and rival squirrels) and plunked it into water-rich soil. After rains and snow and freezing and thawing, the tannins leach into the soil and leave the red oak acorn as sweet as a white one.
This brilliant feat performed by what is essentially a bushy-tailed rat is the best way of showing you that there are acorns and then there are acorns: Some really are so bitter they’re not worth working with. But others, like the Eastern white oak, the bellota oaks of Europe and the Emory oak of the Southwest, are sweet enough to need minimal or no processing.
Knowing this goes a long way toward solving the Forager’s Dilemma. What is this dilemma? Think for a second: If you are a skilled hunter-gatherer, finding meat and fish is not terribly difficult. And wild greens, berries and other yummy plants are pretty easy to find, too. Where things get tricky is that third leg of the nutritional stool: Starch. For the most part, finding a sufficient supply of the Staff of Life is no easy task.
If you live in the Northwoods of Minnesota, Wisconsin and such, you are blessed with wild rice. Farther south lives the Jerusalem artichoke, a big tuber that grows underneath a little sunflower. Swampy places have arrowhead (a/k/a wapato), cattail and tule tubers. There are prairie potatoes in the Great Plains. Overlaying all of this are the oaks and their acorns.
Unless you are near a swamp, there is no easier way to collect sufficient starch for a whole year than to collect and process acorns. This is why many Indian groups did, especially here in California. Now mind you, I am not about to give up wheat or potatoes or rice for a diet of acorns. But as an ingredient, as a piece of a larger diet, acorns deserve a place in serious, modern cooking.
The easiest way to wrap your mind around this is to imagine acorns as free chestnuts — chestnuts that happen to need some processing before you eat them.
Any chestnut recipe can become an acorn recipe, and in fact acorns have been used this way in Europe and North Africa for millennia. They are still eaten with some frequency in Korea. While not easy to find, you can suss out a few acorn recipes among the Berbers, Spanish, Italians and French. Farther north, the Germans drink an acorn coffee.
This is what I started with once I had my acorns. Back in October I’d gathered a big sack full with my friend Elise at a park near my house. I’d left them lying around for a while, and when I got around to shelling them found out that many acorns harbor a nasty little maggoty thing that is the larva of the oak weevil. I got rid of all the infected acorns and shelled them with a hammer.
That’s actually the hardest part about dealing with acorns: They don’t come out of their shells too easily. Once out, they needed to be boiled to rid them of tannins. We’d gathered California valley oak acorns, which are relatively low in tannins, so I needed only five changes of water before they tasted good. Believe me, that’s not bad in the acorn world.
Once processed, I knew I was not going to cook with the acorns right away, so I roasted them in a 325 degree oven until they turned chocolate brown. I guessed (correctly as it happened) this would stabilize the acorns for storage, so I cooled them and shoved them in the fridge for a month or so.
Last week I finally ground most of them into flour, and tried this acorn coffee I’d read about. I put 2 tablespoons in a press pot and poured boiling water over it. I let the mixture steep for few minutes and poured it off.
I immediately noticed it was not black like the chicory coffee I’d made earlier this year. In fact, it looked like it already had a little cream in it. I put some sugar into the cup and tasted it…
…And I’ll be damned if it did not taste uncannily like tea with cream in it — only there was no cream. Go figure. Did I like it? Sure, it was fine. But I’m a coffee drinker, not a tea drinker. The chicory coffee suits me better.
My next experiment was to make an acorn flour flatbread. Initially I intended to make something like the Ligurian flatbread farinata, which is made with chickpea flour. So I hydrated some acorn flour in water, added some salt and let it sit overnight. Next day I got a griddle hot and poured out the crepe-like batter into it, then plunked it into a 400 degree oven.
Big epic fail. The crepe never came together, and essentially became cooked acorn meal at the bottom of the griddle. To add insult to injury, I had oversalted the stuff. Not happy.
Round 2 would stay in Italy, but the model would be a piadina, which is essentially an Italian flour tortilla. I had about 1/2 cup of the hydrated acorn flour remaining, so to that I added 1 1/2 cups of regular wheat flour and some olive oil. I kneaded the dough for a while, let it rest and tried it on a tortilla pan greased with olive oil.
Success! These not only look good, but taste wonderful, too. The acorn flour adds a lot here: It darkens the bread, makes it taste richer and yes nuttier, and I suspect the sugars in the acorn help the browning.
All in all, I’d definitely make this again. It was quick and easy once I had the flour on hand, and was wonderful eaten simply with parsley and some feta cheese. Click for the full acorn flatbread recipe.
This is only the beginning of my acorn experiment. I have a slew of acorn recipes queued up that I think work pretty well. I’ve done a fair bit of research into how other cultures use acorns, and also want to get into the nitty gritty of how to collect and process acorns.
So stay tuned.
I can’t believe you didn’t serve those with Brunswick stew!
But I think it’s great that you’re using acorns.
Hank – once again yet another great post. This is awesome.
I have never seen an acorn shaped like the one in your photo. They don’t grow them like that here in the East! Ours are red, mostly roundish in shape with a point on the bottom and quite small. In fact probably at least 1/2 as small as the one pictured. There are oodles of them on the trail that I take when I walk Thor in the woods. They are so small that if hit with a hammer they would be just a tiny pile of mush. So acorns here aren’t a thing to consider eating unless you are “nutty”!
We have about 16 cups of acorn meal in one cup bags in the freezer. That is this years harvest.
We use a nutcracker across the top and bottom of the nut, along with some quality time with a nutpick.seems to work good, too.
I think we did about 3 weeks worth of water changes mostly in a 5 gallon bucket. We did heat the acorn mix but I don’t think we boiled them this time. We did soak them for a while. Then we ground them in the blender and soaked them some more. The last bit was putting the meal in an inside out pillow case to drain. I think a bag in creek would be ideal, the only issue might be guarding it from enterprising varmints.
I use one cup of acorn meal when I make whole wheat bread. It’s not a big flavor difference, but I like it.
I am glad to see we are not the only nutty people.
In Spain, it’s usual to find during the Chritsmas period, many acorns sold along with almonds, nuts… in the markets. I think they are acorns from the Quercus ilex sp. I used to forage them when I lived in Spain, their taste is slightly sweet and not bitter at all.
I gathered acorns for the first time this year. I’m in the east too, so none of those long, slender, low-tannin acorns for me. But really they weren’t for me anyway. I gathered them for my chickens. I ran into the acorn weevil problem too, but now that I know what to look for it will be trivially easy to set aside infested acorns next year. I’ll set them aside because the chickens are even happier to eat the weevils than they are to eat the acorns. The weevils come out of the nuts in a day or two and can then be thrown in the hens’ pen. And they love the acorns. I crush them up, a few handfuls at a time, and feed them to the girls. At 1700 calories per pound of the nut meats, that’s a local resource I can in good conscience ignore.
No trace of off flavors in the eggs thus far. I was afraid they’d start to taste like jamon iberico (not to my liking), but no. Must glean more acorns next year!
Very interesting! We started gathering acorns this year to feed to our pigs. We have burr oaks, white oaks, and red oaks. The burr oaks were closest to the pigs, and they’re not bitter at all. I wrote about it here: http://antiquityoaks.blogspot.com/2009/10/hickory-nuts-acorns-and-pigs.html and here: http://antiquityoaks.blogspot.com/2009/09/acorn-harvest.html
Diana: I have not yet shot any squirrels for a proper Brunswick stew yet. Hoping to get out before the season ends…
LanesvilleLady (also known as mum): Actually the eastern white oak has the second best acorn in the US, behind the Emory oak of the Southwest. I’ll have to serve some to you and you’ll see…
Jean: I like the extra “umph” acorn flour gives to wheat breads, too. There is an easier way to leach acorns than what you do, but it does involve boiling water. I will gop into it in a few days.
Citron Vert: Would love to get my hands on some of those acorns. I hear they are great for more than just feeding hogs.
Kate: Nice idea! Have you eaten any of these chickens? I bet their meat would take on some flavor after feeding them acorns for a few weeks.
Deborah: Those will be some tasty pigs, and who can beat free forage, yes?
Hank, that was a fantastic read! Very happy to know that tidbit about squirrel acorn-burying.
And having a free alternative to chestnuts is valuable knowledge—acorn mousse maybe?
I have just found your lovely blog and am so thrilled that I did. I spend countless hours gathering acorns for crafting and for feeding to our chickens (though as Kate mentions above, our girls prefer the grubs too). I’ve wanted to try making an acorn flour and now I have the little shove I needed. Can’t wait for fall.
Hank, no, we’ve not eaten any of them. These are our new layers. We’ll make them into stock when they’re mostly done laying, but that won’t be for at least 1.5 years. I didn’t gather enough acorns to do more than supplement the girls’ feed for a few weeks. So I’m not expecting them (the stock) to taste acornish when we get around to slaughtering them. I’m told acorns can account for 50% of a layer’s feed though.
Hank, I’ve always wondered about acorns and buckeyes. You know me, and as a guy who grew up in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains, and who is also a conspiracy theorist on subjects of government emplosion, I love having every bit of survival knowledge that I can soak into my cranium. So the subject of using acorns for food is right up my alley. I do wonder if you have any recommendations for use while in the wild with limited resources. Also I’m wondering if you’ve ever considered cooking with buckeyes?
I’ve always wondered about acorns too – we don’t have a lot of oak here in the Pac NW, but my family in TX has a bunch on property. I’ll try to find out what they are and have them send some out – they just think of them as ‘stuff that messes up the driveway.’ Terrific post, so informative.
Hope your ankle’s better soon!
Jenny
I am pretty sure the oaks we used this year were black oaks. They had sooo many beautiful round acorns falling everywhere, that I just couldn’t say no. I stuffed my pockets and all the bags I had with this treasure.
Our first year of acorn processing, we used a cloth bag in the water closet portion of our toilet. That worked pretty good but we were limited to a small amount of acorn meal, maybe a quart.
I will enjoy reading a way to make this a bit easier.
Today it’s Indian corn and acorn meal wheat bread.
It’s posts like this that mean you’ll always be my wild food hero hank. Happy new year fella
SBW
Hank – that’s is a fascinating post, as often.
How did you grind the acorn into flour? do you have a grain mill? the food processor?
This was a great post. I look forward to trying the acorn coffee some day. Perhaps next season I’ll come a collectin’ with you, as I’ve never tried acorns before.
Wow, so sorry to hear about the achilles tendon! Needing surgery sucks, but the recovery time will definitely speed your book along. Besides, you’ll be back on your feet just in time for Spring! I hope all goes well for you.
You’ve inspired me to try cooking with acorns, the piadina sound delicious. Thanks for sharing the trials and successes along the way.
this. is. awesome.
Great post. I remember reading about eating acorns in “My Side of the Mountain,” – the children’s book in which a boy runs away to the Catskills to live off the land – but I thought the process of making them edible was far more complicated than the one you’ve described.
Congratulations on the successful surgery! Here’s hoping for a speedy recovery!
Glad the surgery is done and successful! Sorry about the season. I’ll tell my brother who will properly grieve for you. Thanks for all the wonderful posts in 2009. Best to you and Holly for the new year.
Codfish: Acorn mousse? Sure, why not? Maybe in the style of a flourless chocolate cake?
Kate: You should try feeding the heck out of the layers with acorns once they’re headed for the stockpot and see what they taste like.
Matt: Never worked with buckeyes. Lets get a bunch and see what we can make with them. Are they still OK? Or will we need to get them next fall?
Jean: Heard about the toilet flushing technique for leaching the acorns. Definitely a conversation starter…
Sylvie: I used a coffee grinder to pulverize the roasted acorns. Worked pretty well.
And thanks to everyone for the good wishes about my achilles tendon surgery! It came out well and while I am still prety immobile, the pain is going away…
excellent post! hmmm acorns…. i’m intrigued
Oh, Hank. So sorry to hear about the Achilles. Hope the healing process goes quickly and smoothly! I am fascinated by your posts. Love the idea of gathering acorns. I’ll have to check the park near us to see how many Oaks there are for future reference. And I had to smile when I saw Adele’s comment, since my 8 year-old son is reading “My Side of the Mountain” right now. Just might have to plan a little Mountain Dinner based on the food items from the book.
Hank – This is so interesting! I have been toying with the idea of cooking acorns for a very long time, but everything I’ve read had mentioned days and days of labor to get the tannins out – thanks so much for clarifying the white oak/red oak difference. I’m definitely going to make some oak tea!
I know you mentioned that you’ll have more posts about this coming up, and I’ll be patiently waiting, however I do have one question. What do you know about when to collect the acorns. The acorns off my parents’ valley oak tree are very green when they first fall off the tree. I noticed in the pictures that yours are brown. Ours don’t turn brown until much later, but often by then they’ve either (a) sprouted, or (b) have bugs in them. Insights on when to gather?
Carina: I will definitely answer those questions in the last of the three acorn posts, which is coming later this week. Short answer: Green ones are OK, as are sprouted ones…
Spenceviile Wildlife Area still has TONS of acorns laying around, if anybody was interested. Picked up a few myself earlier in the week. Positivly no ducks or squirrels though!
Have you seen this pickled acorn recipe?
http://www.eatweeds.co.uk/spiced-pickled-acorns#more-829
Hello Hank,
I just found your site and am truly excited. In about a month, I am leaving corporate world for that of permaculture/wildcrafting/love all things cooking and food. Thank you for all the lovely info! It will come in good use as I further re-orient towards a more natural life and away from chasing paychecks.
Best,
Joey
The constant clunk of acorns falling on my roof led me to thinking that there HAD to be something constructive I could do with them. Hence a google search and, voila, a Hank discovery. I’m a follower now. Thanks for showing me a way to use these otherwise lethal missiles from above. Plus, I’m on the east coast so am blessed with the white oak (lucky me!).
Thank you so much for posting this! My family and I moved to our home last winter. The lot has a huge oak tree in the front yard that dumps oodles of acorns all over the place. I thought that there might be a use for them and I’m so happy I stumbled upon your website!! I’m looking forward to trying out some recipes! And most definitely will be one of your followers! I love your style of writing!! Thanks again!
[...] industrious as is required for the long and involved process of soaking out the tannins and preparing the acorns for consumption when I don’t even know how successfully I’ll use the flour, let alone how compellingly [...]
Dallas, Ft. Worth and South Texas has post oak trees. Not too bitter like a live oak. Try Post Oak acorns. Also, take the caps off the nuts, drop the nuts in a bucket of water. The ones that float are bad ones. The ones that sink are good, no worms. Chow.
[...] and Acorn Cookies, among others), including from people who know food much better than I do, like Hank Shaw (yet another “local”), who also gives recipes for Acorn Flour Cake, Grouse Soup, Acorn [...]
[...] has been called ‘forager’s dilemma’, the problem of procuring, even in a world seemingly bursting with wild food, the energy-rich [...]
Would nixtamalisation work for getting rid of the tannins? I soak green olives in a wood ash paste for about a week to get rid of the oleopicrins that make olives bitter. It takes almost no energy and the olives are ready to bottle after rinsing thoroughly.
Would the same thing work for acorns?
[...] are other great resources on eating acorns: http://honest-food.net/2009/12/26/acorns-and-the-foragers-dilemma/ http://honest-food.net/2010/01/14/acorn-pasta-and-the-mechanics-of-eating-acorns/ [...]
I processed acorns for the first time ever last month and then made flour and bread. It is some of the heartiest, most delicious, moist and dense bread I have ever had! The bread is SO EASY to make, too. The hard part is, of course, processing the acorns but I’ve been learning how to do it. I loved reading your post because I, too, learned the same things along the way – about the little larvae, that letting the acorns sit for a while pretty much eliminates them, the best ways and times to crack the acorns, how to tell when they are done. It’s really a lot of fun.
I recently read about a great way to leech the tannins out of the acorns; they stuffed the acorns into panty hose and tossed them into the upper tank on the toilet, so every time they flushed the water was replaced with fresh water, and the tannin-filled water was sent down to the bowl.