Galo Mateos Pizarro

Hans,
Here I send you a couple of links in spanish on the subject:

http://foro.infojardin.com/threads/bellotas-dulces-y-amargas.80160/

http://jardin-mundani.blogspot.com/2014/01/bellotas-dulces-un-manjar-de-dioses.html

Hans,
Thank you for the links, I enjoyed the reading. As it is said on them, the term sweet is subjective and I guess that has been the subject of my discussion. My opinion is not biased due to regional occurrence of sweet acorns within Spain since I traveled mostly all over Spain and I never found meaningful regional differences in the flavor of the acorns.
Sorry if I got intense with the subject.

I live in Madrid, right in the middle of the pink area of the wikipedia map that Hans posted. I am 62 and I have always been a country man. I am the only person I know that always try the acorns I come across with. Today I tried maybe 20 different ones (the acorns are starting to be tempered enough). I can count with the fingers of one of my hands the number of people I ever met that consider acorns in Spain edible for humans, and those who consider them edible know that if you are to eat them strait from the ground, they are almost always bitter to certain degree. Yes you can eat acorns from the trees, but they are in general too bitter, after one month on the ground they are bearable to me and after two or three months the odd ones that have survived are still slightly bitter but definitely edible.
I have never found myself a sweet acorn producing tree, but I tried sweet acorns given to me by different people, there are few articles in Spanish talking about them and the odd tree that produces them. Of course people have eaten acorns in times of scarcity of food and you can process them to get rid of the tannin, but in every attempt I made to cook them or roast them I never came out with something that I would enjoy eating. In Spain we have many more acorns than chestnuts and in autumn and winter you find people selling roasted chestnuts on the streets but never acorns.
As I commented in a previous post, farmers in Spain feed acorns mainly to pork and when they market them they refer to these acorns as sweet acorns when they belong to the subspecies Ballota (acorn in Spanish is "bellota") but I guess this is just because these are less bitter than those of other quercus species that grow in Spain.
Maybe in Morocco 20% of the trees have sweet acorns, that I don't know, but I assure you that in Spain almost nobody consider them edible, but the few ones that have been lucky enough to try the sweet ones, even if wikipedia says that they are sweet and edible.

Kostas,

You posted two pictures, the first one looks like a quercus ilex, the second one is definitely not. Ilex leaves don't have lobes, by the shape of the leaves, it looks closer to a quercus pubescens.
In Spain we have millions of hectares covered with Quercus Ilex and I don't  think I am to mistaken if I say that one out of 10.000 trees have sweet acorns.

Kostas,

They charge 21€ per each 20 cm grafted tree. They said over the phone that the don't ship outside the island (Mallorca-Spain) if you cant find any sweet acorn producing oak, we can look into the export paperwork and I am willing to help you with it on the Spanish part of it.

In case you want to contact directly with the nursery, here is the contact information their web is also in English and German and It is a great reliable nursery:
Viveros Llabrés
+ 34 971834888
viverosllabres.com

I just talked to the nursery and they confirm that the acorns of their donor trees are sweet for human consumption. They also confirmed that it is forbidden for them to ship abroad due to the xylella outbreak.

After a quick review of the EU legislation, it seems possible to do the export of plants upon the issuance of a official certificate that declares the plants Xylella free, but of course before any export attempt, an in depth study of whether this is feasibly or not must be carried out both in Greece and Spain.

Kostas,

Acorns from quercus ilex rotundifolia varies in bitterness from tree to tree and once ripe they are completely dark brown, and as it happens with chestnuts, the ripe acorns get sweeter (or lose some bitterness) and the shell becomes lighter in color as time passes. The real sweet ones are not bitter at all when ripe.
Here in Spain people in general never dare trying acorns and when they refer to sweet acorns they mostly talk about fodder for porks. Just to make sure this is not the case with little grafted trees offered by the nursery, tomorrow I will give them a call to make sure we are talking about real sweet acorns. If they are, I will check how we can handle the xilella fastidiosa and I will get back to you with my findings.
Have a good day,

Galo

Answering to Kostantinos,

If anyone reading this from Spain or Portugal and has access to edible oak acorns, when they mature this winter...I would gladly pay for them. It's a good point...another tree that provides food for our two legged friends.

In Spain we have two subspecies of Quercus Ilex, Quercus ilex subsp. ilex and Quercus ilex subsp. Ballota (Rutundifolia), as you said, is the second one the one that produces the sweet edible acorns, but finding a specimen with real sweet edible acorns is very difficult.

Of course, the few old shepherds that remain may know the trees that produce sweet acorns, but I don’t know of anyone with real interest in selecting and propagating these trees. There in a nursery in Mallorca that sells small grafted trees claiming to be sweet acorn producers and I have two of them, but I will not know if the claim is true for at least three or four years when they grow the first acorns.

Sweet acorns are a real delicacy, but one cannot just plant one to grow a sweet acorn tree, since most (if not all) new trees will produce bitter acorns as they are hybrids and it seems that the sweet character is regressive. Shepherds in Spain didn’t know the necessary grafting technic needed to replicate the good trees and currently there in not much interest in preserving this trait, mostly out of ignorance since almost no one in Spain knows that there are sweet edible acorns.

Having enough time, there are a couple of things that can be done to find and grow good sweet acorn trees. First ask the current producer of grafted trees to hand out few acorns to try them and make make sure that they are really sweet and if so spread that tree and second travel around the Extremadura county in Sapin talking to the old shepherds and asking them to show which are the good specimens from which the grafts should be collected.

My two cents