Edibility of Acorns

William Bronson wrote:
What can one do with tannin filled water?

How about adding it to cider? If you don't have cider apples, you need to add tannins somehow. For my last batch I added tea bags

Where I live we have big beautiful red oaks. I eat the acorns from them. The past couple of years I have been trying to train/encourage squirrels to collect them for
Me. I have boxes half buried and covered with brush. I put a little corn in for them as a trade. The first year I did have success, so last year I put out more but unfortunately last year was a bad acorn year.

If you're looking for acorn recipes, we have a few like acorn maple ice cream and acorn drop biscuits posted on our family blog and I'll be posting more in upcoming months. Here are the acorn posts we have right now.  I have been writing a book on acorn cookbook and foraging guide, so I'll be sharing a lot of other info on the blog from that.

We do hot water leaching and cold water leaching.  I tend to do both, since they produce such different results and each have benefits.  We don't have livestock to make use of the buggy ones but the good ones are all used for cooking for us, as everything acorn flavored is so delicious.  It's one of our favorite wild foods.  I've made everything from "burgers" and "meatballs" (surprisingly tasty) to acorn extract to bread and muffins, pancakes, mini-donuts, waffles, casseroles...

I don't bother trying to dry them first.  I look at it like anything else in season and I deal with it all when it comes.  There are seasons of bounties like wild asparagus, apples, pears, morels, elderberries, etc. and they're just a huge part of our daily life during their times.  So I process acorns all at once as harvested and then put them up as whole roasted acorns in jars (they keep well once roasted) or as dried flour in the freezer.  I read about one family in the 1900's that had a whole room in their house for acorn storage.  It had a Dutch door (top and bottom halves that opened independently) and they just poured them into this room and then put their kids over the bottom door into the room once a week to stir them all up and keep any from getting moldy.  It sounds improbably but it makes me smile.  

It's my understanding that different Native American tribes processed acorns in different ways, but this is a wonderful little free PDF book for schools that has good information on how some California tribes processed acorns, with photos.

Also, just a heads up -- don't let your dogs eat many of the acorns.  They are poisonous to some animals like dogs and cattle (but cattle only if they eat a lot of them).  They are fine for others, obviously, like squirrels and pigs.

~Alicia

Anyone know about Japanese acorns?
We gathered a bunch,  opened them up and immediately they started to show signs of bruising?  🤔

Joseph, welcome to the forum.

I am not familiar with Japanese acorns though this might help:

greg said, "the main danger in nuts from the ground is potential fungal activity, and the toxins that can bring (aflatoxin, largely). the problem is that the ground is where all the nuts end up!

i’ll add that acorns can bruise when they fall in a way that makes a dark spot (probably a tannin thing) that doesn’t decrease the edibility if the acorns are processed within a few days, but that’s always just on the one side they landed on. dark blotches in a couple spots on an acorn is no bueno.

https://permies.com/t/170827/howabout-acorns-alright#1341697

not sure if you really mean japanese oak (Q. mongolica), which i don’t have any experience with, and not the much more common (in the us) sawtooth oak (Q. acutissima), which i do…but some species (sawtooth included) when uncured do blacken (oxidation, probably?) when broken bits are exposed to the air. is that the ‘bruising’ you mean? that doesn’t seem to have too much effect on the final product, at least if leaching happens relatively soon.

Adrien Lapointe wrote:Have you ever tried to press the oil out of the acorns?

I haven't personally, but I know Sam Thayer does, and you can often buy it on his website. I think there is huge potential there for people with access to a press!

My favourite ways to use acorns so far have been to add ~20% cold leached Garry Oak flour to my sourdough. I also made a stew with some hot leached chunks which was pretty tasty. My issue was having to process them right before using which was a bit of a pain, so this year I'll try the technique outlined above!

i was just pressing pin oak acorn oil yesterday. the nice thing is that if you get the kernels good and clean (no shell) before pressing, you can put the presscake straight into leaching for flour, too. and the acorn oil itself is pretty amazing tasty stuff.

I discovered that the toughest adversary to leaving acorns in a stream to get rid of tannins is the "Overzealous Park Ranger" who evidently found them and removed them.  Nevertheless, it seems the best way to do it if you have a natural stream.

Nature's Garden (Thayer) had a section on acorns which was fairly good.  I believe it was from there that I got this anecdote:  early californians were called "acorn-eaters" as an epithet, indicating that they were eating lousy food.  However, much like the europeans who replaced the pine forests with beef cattle (and gave the first nations there protein deficiencies as a result) acorns were actually more nutritious than the alternatives.  Perhaps the epithet had roots in the fact that acorns, if not processed quickly, will mold easily (those that didn't know that would assume that acorns were a terrible idea for a staple food.)  Of course, they might have thought different once the healthier acorn eaters slaughtered them with their strong limbs and oak spears....

Cj Sloane wrote:

William Bronson wrote:
What can one do with tannin filled water?

How about adding it to cider? If you don't have cider apples, you need to add tannins somehow. For my last batch I added tea bags

Possible, but unlikely - crab apples are easier to add to cider for tannins.  Most orchards grow crab apple trees in order to boost pollination, so no problems there.  It's hard finding good quality crabs in the city though, so maybe for urban ciders, but again I think you need pretty limited numbers of crabs to make apple cider/scrumpy.  I'm using maybe 30 crabs to a 30 gallon scrumpy cider.  If it really added to the taste, perhaps.  I doubt you'd have to use the acorns anyways though - the shells still have a lot of tannins left as I recall.

David Livingston wrote:Anyone know the situation regarding european oaks ?
We have a couple of 200 year old ones here on site . Great wonderful trees it would be cool to be able to eat the acorns in my bread.

David

Yes, we tried the acorns of the oaks growing here in the Netherlands (Quercus robur probably). Together (group of 4) we gathered the acorns in the wood where one of us lives. We peeled them and then each of us took a part home to process. All of us first soaked (leached) them, but not all in the same way. My part I first cut in small pieces, I put them in cold water and refreshed the water twice daily for a few days, and then once daily for the rest of the week. Then I dried the acorn pieces and tried to make them into flour with the blender. It was very course flour.
I used a recipe for savoury cookies/crackers. The others made other recipes, like 'acorn coffee' and 'acorn chocolate cookies'. We came together again and tasted everything. All agreed that in general we did not like the taste of what we made. Only the savoury cookies I made were 'palatable'. Conclusion: we won't try acorns again.

it sounds like they were incompletely leached. did any of you taste the acorns before you decided you were done leaching them?

greg mosser wrote:it sounds like they were incompletely leached. did any of you taste the acorns before you decided you were done leaching them?

No, we did not taste them 'fresh'.
If after a week of leaching they still don't taste nice, I consider them 'not good food' (only for emergencies).