You also want to prevent your acorns from mildewing by keeping them very dry-the area near a woodstove is a pretty great environment to keep a basket of acorns. It will be much easier to remove their hats and outer hulls if the acorns have had a chance to dry a bit. Lay your acorns out in the sun in a single layer, or near a stove or sunny place in your house to dry out. Sort out all the acorns that have holes or visible mildew. It’s the second drop of acorns we are after. Or, if you have very few infested acorns, the little grub is good protein for wildlife if you have a robust population of animal relatives that feast in your yard. You can gather up these acorns for the burn pile to cut back on the number of infected acorns next year. Those nuts often bear a tiny little borehole from a moth, and though you can technically eat the growing little grub inside, I won’t blame you if you’re not feeling that decolonized yet. The season change will bring those first breezes, which will knock the first batch of acorns from the tree. The long answer to how to make acorn flour Put the crispy dry acorn meal back into the blender and whiz it into flour.Put the acorn meal in a food dehydrator, using the fruit leather trays or parch- ment, at 115☏ until it’s crispy and dry.Place the acorn meal in some cheesecloth and squeeze out all the liquid acorn milk into a bowl.Do this until the meal is no longer bitter. Pour off the yellow tannin water each day, add new water, and shake it up.Pour the “milkshake” into a jar, screw the lid on, and place it in the refrigerator.Put all the peeled acorns into a blender with an equal amount of water and blend into something that looks like a milkshake.Peel or rub the red or brown flaky testa (seed coat) from the acorn.Crack the acorns with a nutcracker, hammer, or stone.Gather up a bunch of acorns in a basket and let them dry for a couple of days inside the house near a stove or sunny place, in a single layer to prevent mildew.(for people who have made acorn flour and just need to remember the order of the steps) The short answer to how to make acorn flour What you’ll need: an acorn-collecting bucket, a blender, a large jar (2 to 21⁄2 liters) with an airtight lid, cheesecloth, a fine-mesh sieve, bowls, a nutcracker, a chestnut knife, a dehydrator There is a reason most tribes would leach their acorns in cold water and then cook the meal in baskets with hot basalt stones until thick and bubbling: It is the most nutritious way and, as long as it’s been leached well, it’s delicious, whether you like it with frogs (lumps) or not. I don’t teach hot leaching because I prefer to maintain the acorn’s nutritional value. A cold leaching process takes much longer but offers more versatility when using the flour. There are two methods for processing acorns: cold leaching and hot leaching. The nuts from the oak tree, all acorns are edible with the proper processing. The cookbook has lots of creative recipes for acorn flour (crackers! Pie crust! Acorn miso rub for meat!) and is available through Heyday.Īcorns are a cornerstone staple food for most Native communities. Here, in an excerpt from Chími Nu’am-which means “Let’s eat!” in Karuk -Olson walks us through the labor of love that is acorn processing, from collecting the nuts to baking your own bread. But if you really want to connect with the oak woodlands and savannahs around us in the Bay Area in a new way-try starting from scratch. Now, in the spirit of Olson’s approach, you can substitute a crusty brown bread, or even bake the bread with some commercial acorn flour from a Korean market. ![]() With that essay, she includes a recipe, Mushrooms and Mussels on Acorn Bread. In Bay Nature’s Fall 2023 issue, Olson, who grew up near the Trinity River in northern California and now lives in the Bay Area, writes about a quintessential fall mushroom-the matsutake (also known as xayviish in Karuk). This book requires a connection to nature and food gathering that you will need to nurture, to become inspired by your role as an environmental steward.” But she doesn’t mind if you use a few store-bought substitutes to get started. “It isn’t the type of book in which you find a recipe and then run to the store for the ingredients you need to fulfill your weeknight dinner grind. “Think of this as sort of a reverse cookbook,” she writes, in the beginning of her newly released cookbook, Chími Nu’am: Native California Foodways for the Contemporary Kitchen (Heyday, 2023), which is intended for those new to gathering wild foods. ![]() ![]() It isn’t always easy to find wild food, or to know what to do with it. Karuk food writer and cookbook author Sara Calvosa Olson wants to help us decolonize our diets-but she doesn’t think we have to do it in one fell swoop.
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