![]() Once your flour is ground, you can start cooking with it immediately or freeze it for storage. You can do your grinding between two rocks, in a blender, a food processor, or in a traditional flour grinder. Acorn chunks aren’t easy to grind when they are soaking wet from their final leaching, so you’ll want to dry them out until they can be ground into flour without creating a paste. Once you’ve gotten rid of enough of the bitter and astringent tannic acid to make the acorns palatable, you can jump right into flour making. ![]() Grind Your Own Flour Grind your acorns into flour. However you cook them, once they’ve changed color a little and gained a roasted smell, they’re ready to eat. ![]() Bake for roughly 15 minutes at 375 degrees F, or until they start to brown a little. At home, make one layer of leached acorn chunks on a baking sheet (it’s okay if they are still damp from leaching), and sprinkle them with fine salt. Once they pick up some color (and some grease), salt them and dig in. Over the campfire, move around some broken and leached acorn chunks in a greased skillet. Roasting is also one of your easier options for preparation. Since acorns generally only have two flavors (horrible and bland), roasting these nutritious nuts can add some much-needed dimension to their flavor. Roast Them For Flavor Once the tannic acid is removed from your acorns, you could certainly treat them like any other nut or seed by roasting them. Dry them out or use them wet for various food dishes, drinks, and snacks. Step 4 – When you’ve soaked the acorns in enough batches of water that they have become bland, you’re done with leaching. Taste test a larger nut chunk, and determine if more soakings are required (they usually are). Pour off the first batch of tea-colored water, and save for medicinal purposes. Step 3 – Let the acorns sit in their bath for a few hours. Hot water will leach out the acid faster. Step 2 – Drop the nut pieces into a pot of water, and use twice as much water as acorns. This is necessary for soaking since the shells are waterproof. Once smashed, separate the shell from the actual nut pieces. Step 1 – Use rocks or a wide hammer to break the acorns open and crack the nut meat into pieces. Luckily, tannic acid is water-soluble, and we can remove it with a soaking technique that most people call “leaching.” Here’s the basic process: You just have to get rid of the tannic acid, which may be abundant or light – depending on species and growing conditions. In fact, acorns are perfectly safe for those who don’t have an acorn/nut allergy, and they are listed as edible in all the survival guides. Growing up, my family had always said that acorns were poisonous, though this was probably due more to someone’s tasting of a raw acorn (and subsequently spitting it out) than any real heath threats. It just takes a little time to get them out of their shells and soak away their bitter acid. Remove The Shells (and the Bitterness) Processing acorns isn’t hard at all. Consumption of tannic acid can cause nausea, diarrhea, constipation, and in extreme cases, intestinal bleeding. While tannic acid has some outstanding medicinal benefits for topical problems, it’s an irritant to the GI tract. Some species produce huge acorns with low levels of tannic acid, while others grow tiny acorns that are loaded with it. This bitter substance can (and should) be soaked out in water, using various techniques. Other kinds of caps cover half of the shell, and some almost surround it.Īll oak acorns are edible, and they all contain some degree of tannic acid. Some of them are shallow, covering very little of the nut’s shell. Acorn cups (or caps) can have very different sizes, shapes, and textures, based upon the species. The nuts have a smooth shell that is held inside a second cup-like shell called a “cupule.” This “shell and cap” structure is much different from other tree nuts like hickory and walnut, whose inner nut shells are surrounded by outer husks. Acorns are different from other tree nuts because of their interesting two-part shell. There are more than 600 species of oaks found growing around the world, and every one of them produces acorns. ![]()
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