Acorns from Field to Table, Part 2: PROCESSING

This is the second post in a series of how to turn foraged acorns, a near-ubiquitous, totally under-utilized food resource, into delicious food for you and your family. In the first post, we talked about the history behind foraging acorns, how to gather them in the wild (it's not hard, haha) and how to store them until its time to process them (find it here: https://steemit.com/foraging/@slhomestead/acorns-from-field-to-table-part-1-foraging )

Now, it's time to finally turn those nuts into useable flour! I'll be sharing the hot-leach method, as it's what I used on our acorn harvest this year (and probably the easiest of the three methods I've discovered so far). We did this entire process off-grid, using our woodstove and some manual tools, so I can guarantee you have what it takes to do this too, if you're interested.

So let's get into it!

Step 1: Washing and Sorting

For us, washing wasn’t necessarily for cleanliness, though it did help get some grit off--it helped reveal some bad acorns, too. I filled up half of our kitchen sink with water and dumped several scoops of acorns into it. Immediately, most of the acorns dropped to the bottom. These are likely to be good. You’ll find that the acorn caps and many bad acorns float on the surface--this makes the first step of sorting quite easy! Take note, however, that almost all dried acorns will float, so if you dry your acorns before processing them, this “float test” won’t be useful to you.

I put all the reject acorns to the side. These were acorns with caps attached, visible exit holes from acorn grubs, cracks, or dark areas on the top disc. They were eventually crushed up and given to our chickens as a treat--they loved picking out the good pieces, and, of course, enjoyed the grubs with relish. As I mentioned in the last article, if you want a long, in-depth write-up on how to visually tell most good acorns from bad, please look up Samuel Thayer’s EXCELLENT book, Nature’s Garden. It’s far more knowledgeable and in-depth than I could ever write with my current experience!

All the acorns that looked good were then spread out in a single layer on several cookie sheets. I dried them in front of our woodstove for several hours, but you can also toast them in the oven at 175 degrees Fahrenheit for an hour and a half. This served to dry them off and warm them for cracking.

Step 2: Cracking and Sorting Again

Now, there are several options when it comes to cracking loads of acorns. It can be as simple as smashing them open with a hammer on a flat surface, or as sophisticated as buying a specialized nut cracker for the purpose. Since we are truly trying to make nuts a vital part of our gastronomical life (we'll be planting lots of hazelnut and maybe even pecan trees in the spring) we decided to invest in a tool that would last us a long time. The Davebilt nutcracker is, in our opinion, the best nutcracker that could be used for this. Hand-cranked, made in America and built to last, this is a solid tool that we’ll be able to pass on to our kids, and is good for most any type of nut. So even though it runs close to $200, we decided that the cost was worth the time and energy that it saved! We were able to crack several pans worth of acorns in an hour.

Check out their website here: http://www.davebilt.com/Product_Page.html

It was during this stage that I actually did the bulk of my sorting. Its inevitable that some bad acorns will ride along with the good ones, but once they’re cracked open, the good is super-easy to separate from the bad. I found that sorting acorns at this stage made the most sense--any that were moldy, had clear evidence of being nibbled by bugs, or were covered with dark spots went into the chicken/compost bucket, and all the tan, waxy-nice nutmeats went into a large stock pot so that they could be leached. During this stage, most of the testas (the dark brown, papery coating over the nut) also came off. Some resources say that you must remove every trace of the testa to have tasty flour, but I found that the odd piece here and there really didn’t make a difference.

From left to right: a good acorn, a debatable one (I gave these to the chickens), and a bad, moldy one

If you need to, you can lay out these cracked acorns on a cookie sheet and let them dry until you’re ready to continue working with them again.

Step 3: Leaching

This next part is important. It’s possible to eat a few raw acorns, but it’s really nothing you’d want to chow down on. White Oak acorns may be somewhat palatable, but many other species of acorns are very bitter in their freshly-harvested form! The high amount of tannins found in the nuts make eating them somewhat unpleasant, and could even give you a bit of an upset stomach. This is why leaching is such a crucial step in making acorn food. All leaching is is soaking acorns in water so that the nutmeat is separated from the water-soluble, bitter tannins. The result is something much more delicious!

There are several types of leaching, including chemical leaching, cold leaching, and hot leaching. I’ll only be detailing hot leaching here, because it’s the only one I’ve tried so far. Thayer (and many other online sources) explains the steps for all the methods.

While hot leaching is a little more convenient than both chemical and cold leaching, it denatures some of the components of the finished flour. This results in a dark brown flour that won’t stick together on its own like the flours you may be used to cooking with. Cold-leached flour takes a bit more time and a few extra steps, but the final product will hold together into a dough.

We hope to experiment with all types of flour eventually, but for the time being, we processed all of our acorns with the hot leaching method, and will be mixing it with wheat flour if ever we need a dough that holds its own.

So, to hot-leach acorns, you need to boil them in several changes of water. Again, we did this on our woodstove, but you can do this on a conventional oven or even over a fire--it’s up to you! After the water turns a rich, brown color, dump the water, refill the pot, and boil them again. Acorns take anywhere from three to more than ten water changes to have a sufficient amount of tannin removed. You’ll have to judge for yourself when they’re ready.

Gotta love how handy the woodstove is!

Acorns after first boiling--notice how coffee-dark the water is!

After about seven water changes, we have clear water!

My test was to sample a nut and see how bitter it was on my tongue. When they tasted sweet, somewhat maple-like, and not at all bitter, I considered them done. Some resources say that you need to wait until the water runs clear, but I found that this was not the case with our acorns. Again, let your senses be the judge!

Step 4: Grinding and Drying into Flour

Now that the acorns are leached, its finally time to turn them into flour. You’ll need to grind them up; twice if you want fine flour. First, we took the damp acorns and ran them through an old-fashioned, hand-crank meat grinder. They’re really easy to find at antique markets and thrift stores--we bought ours for $4! It took a few different visits to vintage shops to find a good priced one (we saw some for as high as $40), but trust me--they’re out there.

Spread the damp nut meal back over your cookie sheet and allow it to dry completely. We placed ours at the base of the woodstove, and stirred it several times throughout the day. With a fire burning during the morning and night, the meal dried within two days.

You can also do this in a dehydrator or in a conventional oven at 170 degrees Fahrenheit until the meal is bone-dry. Seriously--don’t rush this part! If you store the flour with any trace of dampness, it may mold and all your hard work will end up in the compost pile.

The final product of this processing will be a very coarse flour. This can be used as-is, or it can be run through a flour mill or coffee grinder to produce finer flour for baking. I found that putting the coarse flour in bread worked beautifully.

OH MAH GOSH it's finally ready

Now I know, after all this work, you're probably anxious to finally taste the stuff. We'll get into recipes with the third post.

And as an ending note, after seeing all these steps, you might say to yourself, "This is an awful lot of work just to eat a nut." In a way, you are right, but the reality is, all food is work in some respect! If we were to be milling traditional cereal grains like wheat that you had grown on your land, you'd have to do a lot of work to get that to a mill-able state as well (tilling, planting, harvesting, threshing, and so on!). Even just buying food from the store, though it's convenient, is still work: you had to do something to get that money in the first place.

Using acorns is actually a lot less work in my perception because it's a nutrient-dense, starchy food that requires no input. Rather than having to till and plant a field, all I had to do to get nourishment from our oaks is collect the acorns that freely dropped from the already established trees. The Father planted them, watered them, and gave them sun: all I had to do was just wait for them to give it up, haha!

It required a bit of my time, yes, but I found that the time required was somewhat minimal (once I got the hang of it). An hour here to wash, sort, and crack nuts, a day to leach (which required about 10 minutes of accumulated active time to change the water), ten minutes to grind and lay the nutmeal out to dry the next day...and then its done. When we were in the thick of processing, we had nuts drying/leaching/and being ground all at the same time, kind of like clockwork.

So what do you think? Have I piqued your interest in gathering food from wild trees? Does it seem worth the effort to you? Or, do any of you have "alternative" means of gathering food that the general public might find nutty? I'd love to hear in the comments below!

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