Patrick Marchand

I wonder if this would do the trick: https://www.ebay.ca/itm/225231287993?hash=item3470d4b6b9:g:vM4AAOSwdhxjYD9T&var=524175331961

I read about the effect of lye, does it have any effect on the taste ?

I wonder if the tannins actually saturate the water and if they do, are we really reaching that level when leaching the acorns.

During the holidays, I'll be moving into my new home which has an unheated spot that should always be around 0, it would do great as a walkin cooler. I should be able to do some side by side tests and a water pump isnt too hard to find.

Hot leaching is not an option, it cooks the starch so it doesnt bind as well if you try to use it as a flour, besides, it makes for a much less nutritious end product.

As for the davebilt, I saw one go on ebay, but I didnt manage to win the auction. I'm keeping my eyes open, but I'll probably put myself on the waiting list.

This summer I harvested over 60kg of northern red oak, I've already made maybe a kilo of tasty flour by cold leaching in a mason jar, where you grind the nuts and fill with water and change the water every twelve to 24 hours.

But I'd like to imagine a larger scale operation, where I could pay the people who are already picking nuts for nurseries to give me a portion of their harvests so I can produce larger volumes. I think the key to this will be to have a degree of automatisation.

Nut sorting is an interesting challenge, you have to filter out the bad nuts and then sort the good ones by size. A black walnut producer in my region uses a magic eye for this, but thats pretty expensive. Either I convince him to let me hitchhike on his operation or I use the method I've been using now, where I drop the acorns in water, discard the floaters then visually inspect all the others. It's not too hard and it can be done in front of the tv.

Nut drying is pretty easy, you just need the space to lay them all out and a fan.

Nut cracking is already a solved problem and acorns are much easier to crack then walnuts, though I'll have to find an affordable machine, something like the davebilt should do, if I can find one.

Nut leaching is the longest part. It took me a little longer than two weeks to leach my red oaks (though burr oak can take as little as 3 days). You have to change the water every day, that could be harder with bigger volumes. You also have to keep it cold lest it ferments.

My current idea is to build some kind of vat with a pre-filter at the base, to keep the acorn meat in, and a tannin filter underneath to clean the water, the clean water is then pumped through a refrigerator and finally pumped back onto the acorns. Maybe the acorn vat has an agitator to make sure every surface is exposed to water.

I'm planning to work on a proof of concept this winter, but I'd be interested in hearing any advice, ideas, or if you know of any machines that already do this.

Hey ! So one thing I've come to realise following all the various pedology and fertilisation classes I've been following is that whatever size you determine large enough for your growing needs, you should probably double or triple it. The way land prices are it's not going to cost you twice as much and it's going to make rotations, green manure and just general soil management much simpler.

I've been growing them for two years now, they truly are beautiful, though I havent had any fruit yet. This year I'll try to keep the roots alive over the winter.

Note that they are talking about the cap flesh, there are edible boletes with blue staining on the pores or stems.

It's in the leccinum genus, a member of the boletes family. As far as I know, all discovered leccinum's are edible. You can generally recognise them by the dark rugosity's on the stem. The cap in the picture looks too orange to be Scabrum, which usually has a browner / grayer color to the cap. Instead I believe it to be in the Orange Bolete complex, so maybe Leccinum Aurantiacum, but there are several lookalikes, all of them in the orange bolete complex, all of them Leccinum.

The king bolete has a more tan coloured cap and the stem does not have these kinds of rugosities, more like pale reticulation on a somewhat less pale stem.

My favorite way to prepare them is to remove the pores, they get all gooey and dont taste like much, then dry them and use them in soups or bouillon for rice and sauces. The texture when you cook them in the pan is sub-par.

Interesting ! could have an ornemental use. Although I'm personally not the biggest fan of variegated leaves :P Post some pics when you have the time !

Kind of a late response, but when you pick acorns you can dump them in water, the floaters are no good. A quick visual inspection of the sinkers is useful as some sink but clearly have too much damage to be viable.