Processing Acorns

Does anyone here have practical experience and tips on how to make acorn flour.
My 7 year old grandson is enamored with the idea of baking with acorns... we tried last year, but got so much conflicting information on the internet about how to get the best acorn flour.    
  ... all the acorn collecting and cracking turned into a game of collecting all the grubs in the acorns and feeding them to the fish in the pond!
We are in north central Texas, and there are many oak trees around -- water oak and live oaks, as well as red and pin oaks.   Haven't come across burr oaks, but like the idea of bigger acorns because it seems more efficient, but I'm confused about which acorns are the best for making into flour for baking.
   I would really love any recommendations from someone who has actually done this successfully!
Thanks so much for any help,
Kathy

Kathy, welcome to the forums!

Here are some threads that you might find interesting:

https://permies.com/t/72556/kitchen/Acorn-Mush-Preparation
https://permies.com/t/94642/Easy-Acorn-Flour-Muffins-gluten
https://permies.com/t/39781/Acorn-oil-flour
https://permies.com/t/42450/Acorn-Flour-Attempt
https://permies.com/t/166015/Creating-Acorn-bread

Hi Anne,  thank you SO much for your quick reply.  I have been pouring over all the links you sent, and have ordered Alicia's book which looks exactly like what I need!    Very excited to see what we come up with!
Kathy

i’m part-owner of a company that processes wild nuts. i’ve made acorn flour from at least 8 species of oaks. i don’t think there’s a best species for it, but there are definitely differences. weevil grubs can be mitigated somewhat by getting nuts as soon as they fall and then slightly heat-treating the nuts. a waterbath on the stovetop at 116F for 10 minutes should do it. do you have any more specific questions?

Hi Greg,  thanks for your suggestion on treating for weevils!

Last year, we collected all different kinds of acorns (just whatever we found in the area) and put the whole and parts of acorns in a cold water bath that I switched out several times a day.  The nut chunks just turned black, and looked very unappealing.  Most of the nuts had that skin (are people calling it tensel?) and we didn't realize we needed to remove that at first, but even after we started removing that, the nuts still turned black during the cold water leaching process.   I had read that cold water leaching preserves more of the fats and nutrients in the acorns, and is better for flour for baking, so that's why I wanted to do that process.

I was hoping to get a light colored flour for baking... is that not possible?

1. Can I process different species of acorns all at once?
2. Is grinding or blending the nuts into a flour necessary before cold water leaching?  (not doing that last year may be what caused my problems)
3.  Will heat treating the acorns for weevils ruin the nuts for cold water leaching?
4. I've read that the 2nd fall is the one you want to harvest...  Acorns have just started falling in my area, so how long do I wait for the "2nd fall"?
5.  I've read that you can separate out the "bad" or "Weevilly" acorns by seeing which ones float, but we tried that, and there were just as many acorns that sank that had black areas/spots on the nuts as the ones that floated.    I'm assuming the black areas of the nut are "not good" even if there isn't a weevil, especially since I am wanting white/light colored flour... is that right?  These black areas I refer to aren't powdery/eaten/grub filled areas, but solid black spots or streaks in the nut.  Can I just cut out these areas and use the white/cream part of the nut to grind up and leach?

Thank you for any specific guidance you can give!
Kathy

it is possible to get a fairly light-colored flour, but it’s nearly impossible to end up with light-colored baked goods as an end result unless the acorn flour is a very small proportion of the total used. sugars in acorns color strongly when baked - cookies that i make with a fairly pale pure acorn flour look like they were made with dark chocolate when baked. i seriously doubt you can make white bread with acorns.

1) you can, though different species leach differently. depending on the size you can get pieces for leaching, it might be possible to taste one little chip and decide that the batch is done, when pieces of another species are still too high in tannin to be palatable.
2) you do want to increase the surface area for efficient leaching. whole or half nuts can take forever and if the temperature is warm enough, even with regular water changes you might be risking the batch going funky. it doesn’t have to be super fine (that introduces other challenges), but it definitely helps to chip them up a bit.
3) in my experience, no. i’ve also dried/cured for storage acorns under some heat in the past. it may make leaching take a bit longer? but a marginal amount. you don’t want to overdo the warm bath, just kill eggs that haven’t hatched.
4) are you getting the nuts from the first drop out of the way somehow? the early drops are frequently not fully formed or very buggy - either way things the tree decided to stop spending energy on while ripening the good nuts. but how long to wait? i couldn’t say. easiest is to chop a few in half to get a look at what’s happening inside. firm nutmeat that fills the shell is what you want.
5) you can cut those areas out if you want. i suspect they may not be as noticeable after leaching, but do what feels right. i think that ‘bruises’ from dropping can take on that kind of coloration, but that generally doesn’t affect the overall quality, or have much impact on the color of the final product.

hope that helps! feel free to document your process here!