Questions about acorns for eating

Red oaks are dropping acorns *right now* at my place in northern Minnesota. The squirrels and chipmunks are going hog-wild. I don't have much history of eating acorns but I'm looking to rectify that. And I have some questions. Also, as an interesting aside, after picking up a bunch of acorns, my hands have a distinct odor that's unfamiliar but must be acorn-smell.

Which ones do you gather?

Most of the best looking ones are fat and green. Some are brown. Some are stunted and most of those are brown. Does any of that matter? Have brown ones been sitting there all year?



So then, they're sitting under the tree in a wide variety of conditions. Some are obviously at least a year old and spongey. Others are variously quite open and gross. I know to leave those be. But what about the ones that seem fresh but aren't entirely intact?

Some are cracked and if you pinch it, you can get it to softly open up:


Some have a chunk of the shell gone, but the nut doesn't seem particularly bothered:


Some have a hole in the top where the cap used to be that might be the result of rot or infestation:


Some have a tiny little hole or dent in the hard shell:


And a few seem to have been peeled and left uneaten -- I'm not sure what phenomenon leads to that:


So, what do you gather to eat?

I'm don't eat animals for the most part and I'm grossed out at the idea of a spoon full of maggots, but if I'm going to boil these, I doubt I'd notice a few larva, so I'm willing to err on the side of gathering slightly wormy nuts.

How do you process?

From here: https://permies.com/t/371410/permaculture/Foraging-Calories-Species#3762678 I'm looking at this as my default approach:

M Ljin wrote:1.Harvest and dry the acorns

2. Crack and set shells aside (good for mulch)

3. Bring a large pot of boiling water w/ acorns to a boil, leave heat off & wait 12-24hrs, pour off liquid (may contain fat, so maybe scrape it off if there’s enough?) and then repeat until they taste good. Typically takes a week give or take depending on how frequently it’s changed/boiled.

Sam Thayer sets it on top of a woodstove, which would be good too. Unfortunately there is no such sophisticated wood heat in this house.

This particular method (hot leaching of whole or halved acorns) tends to be used wherever oaks of the red oak group are numerous, and I consider it the method I know of for red oak acorns. I haven’t gotten anything edible from any other method. I tried cold leaching a meal ground from the acorns, but the grinding was more effort and it seemed like the fat in them prevented the tannins from leaving in that case. Even then it seems like more of the fat may be lost.

If you have something different to suggest, I'm all ears.

Also, is there a trick to cracking/shelling?

How do you preserve?

Can I do the leaching and then dehydrate them again? Do I store them as nuts/halves/chunks or grind it?

How do you prepare and eat?

Do you eat them as an out-of-hand snack like peanuts? Are they only good ground and mixed into stuff? Bread? Porridge?

The smell is wild isn't it, very tannic. Brown and fully dropped is what I go for, the green ones still filling out tend to need even more leaching. Red oaks have way more tannins than white oak so expect to change the water a fair few times before they're really palatable, but worth the effort.

Acorns do smell so delicious!

Pick ones that have no caps, or the caps fall off easily; ideally don’t if they have conspicuous dark patches or other major blemishes. Also avoid ones with small holes in them. If in doubt, crack open with your teeth (the shells are very soft) or two stones to see what is going on inside. Some of them are mostly poop, others are mostly acorn, some are in between. I pick the grubs out and put them outside.

Let them dry in a warm, dry place safe from rodents, and when you are ready, I crack them with my teeth or between two stones, and pick out any blemished pieces or worms.

The ones that were nibbled by squirrels—who knows? Maybe they tried and thought them too bitter to eat.

Small ones on fallen branches are fine—if they are just immature instead of prematurely dropped.


One person did compare them to boiled peanuts or chestnuts. In my method, I’d compare them to beans—add to soups, fry, eat as a snack, and so on. Soup seems one of the better options because they are a “dry” (slightly tannic) food.

Oh, and if I wanted to press them for a homestead oil, does that happen after leaching or without? Would the Piteba press be good for them? (It seems like they don't want to say so: https://piteba.com/en/content/50-how-much-oil-can-you-press-from-one-kilo-oil-seeds-or-nuts)

Is it earlier than usual to see acorns dropping now? Maybe these are damaged ones and the good ones are still up in the trees? Greg showed a picture of acorn flour here and the nuts definitely looked dark brown. permies.com/t/154413/SALE-high-quality-cold-leached#1209578
He also mentioned some details I guess would be critical for making quality flour: separate acorns by species, cold leaching, change water seven times, etc.

I have three oaks in eyesight of my deck. One of them has dropped a *ton* of seed and the other two not much. But they also don’t seem to have as much seed aloft. I’m not really sure of this is premature but I years past they’ve been mostly green.

i agree that acorns smell amazing - and most species smell different from each other!

northern red oak is kinda borderline oily enough to press for oil, and i wouldn’t expect a piteba to do much against them, even if you could find a way to grate them up into fine threads. the tannins are water-soluble, not oil-, so one can press unleached acorns and get good non-tannic oil, but it’s super fiddly, even using an originally $10,000 press like we do at the nuttery. there’s so much starch in them and amount of oil is so low (as opposed to the more commonly pressed nuts like walnuts and hickories) that it’s easy to accidentally scorch them just from the heat that builds up without all that much pressure. and they’re pretty hard, so it takes a fair amount of pressure. southern reds have more oil (and generally have an orange-colored kernel because of it) but i can’t imagine that’s what you’re dealing with.

collecting them green definitely the way - they just turn brown when dried for storage.

Usually there is a first drop which is smaller and may or may not be more wormy, late August. Then later in September through November (coincides unfortunately with regular deer season, ugh—perhaps on purpose?) is the main mast.

I’ve heard that the common way to extract oil is to crush, then boil, and then skim the oil off as it floats to the surface.

I used to process acorns for years when I lived in California where they were super abundant and large.  Usually I would clip each one in half and then be able to toss any that were wormy or spoiled. These were white oak group acorns, which are lower tannin and spoil quickly.  Native people there preferred black oak acorns since they don't spoil as quickly (dropping in fall and germinating the following spring, white oaks often sprout right away) and can store longer in the shell.  Usually an acorn will give a tell...a discoloration or a spot or a separation from the cap that indicates a worm or mold or something inside....some trial and error should demonstrate this and help your selection.
   My default way to process them was to get them out of the shell and then dry the nuts rock hard in the sun, at which point one can winnow off the thin dark skin that may still be clinging to them, and then store them that way in jugs. Then when I wanted to make some up I would grind these pieces to flour in a heavy vitamix blender, and then leach them by leaving them in a colander lined with fabric under some dripping water....often outside near a thirsty plant. The acorns I had were done in a day of this, black oaks might take longer.  Just taste it and when it's bland and not bitter or acrid it's done.  At that point you can cook them any way you would cook corn grits or polenta, or else blend with some wheat or other flour for breads of various kinds.  When I had a lot of them I would also crack them coarsely and leach for a few days, in multiple changes of standing water in buckets, and then feed them to my chickens.

Given a few days in the house they turn from green to dark brown. A few days in the dehydrator and they turn light brown.

How do I know which dehydrated nut meats are good? Does light vs dark matter?

I would check that the black topmost one is not mouldy. Sometimes the skins, which are hairy, can look molded but are actually fine. If you have the patience, you can run off the skins. I don’t really discriminate between dark and light as long as they have the same texture, but I would intuitively prefer the lighter ones.

What kind of red oak trees do you have? I am following this thread with great interest. Two of my blackjack oak trees are loaded this year. They are self thinning recently, shedding wormy and undeveloped acorns. The good ones will take another month at least. I guss I can just lay down sheets under the trees to collect acorns when they are ready.

This is just an aside, but I’m camping 360 miles SE of home and our campsite has white oak and black walnut both raining down on us. :)

One of the more clever ways to leach out the tannins is to put them in a mesh bag hung in the water tank on a toilet.

Automatic water changes.

Just as a note, I am the author of an acorn foraging and recipe book (Acorn Foraging (aff link), and I've posted a lot of recipes and info about harvesting, leaching and preparing acorns here in the forums.  If it's helpful, this is one thread where I've shared info and a lot of recipes:

Acorn mush preparation
Here's a discussion of the book, as well.

If there's any recipe in particular you'd like, I'd be happy to post it.  I've got them for so many wonderful ways to use acorns -- biscuits, coffee creamer, veggie meat patties, spice cake, beverages, ice cream, waffles, porridge, meatballs, crackers, you name it.  :)

This collage is some of the treats we've made with acorns over the years.  We absolutely love them and they're such a great gluten-free ingredient for our big family with allergies too.

(PS  I've also written a children's foraging alphabet called A is for Acorns (aff link), illustrated by my oldest daughter. I'll include the A page from that for fun, too. Each letter has a wild food you can forage and then in the margins there are other wild edible and medicinal plants that start with that letter to try to name too.)  :)