Foraging - The Acorn Experiment Part 2

When we last "talked" I told you that I had some pretty icky acorn nuts that I still have not eaten.  They are probably destined for the trash BUT I think I am on to something else now.

Just a note about drying whole acorns outside for days between two screens to keep out the bugs and varmints.  Yesterday morning I found a hole chewed or clawed through the top screen.  Something had tried pretty hard to get to those little nuts.  The hole was about the size of an acorn but I could not tell if one was missing or not.  But the determination of that little critter made me even more suspicious that there was something magical in that shell that I just had not found yet.  SO....

I rescued the dried acorns from between the screens and took them inside to crack them.  There were much more "good" ones and I did not find any wormy ones with this batch because when I soaked them in the shell in a bucket, all the bad ones floated to the top and I got to through them away before cracking them to find the worms..   again YUCK!  So most of the nuts I had to work to crack were good nuts.  Well, so to speak.

Remember that I bought a little coffee grinder at a garage sale a few days ago?  It came in handy and so I ground those little nutmeats in the grinder as fine as I could get them and dumped that "flour" into a bowl.  The trick now became how to soak the flour in water until all the tannins were flushed out without losing all the flour down the drain!  I found a piece of loose weave fabric from my fabric stash and used it to line a colander.  Then I rinse and soaked that flour many many times.  The cloth kept the flour in the colander but eventually the water ran pretty clear!

I next spread the very wet flour into a Pampered Chef stoneware pan and placed it in the oven at 150 for several hours.. most of a whole day it took me to make the flour dry again.  It needed some stirring every couple of hours.  Here it is in the pan all wet.  It looked more like hamburger than flour and had a strange aroma when baking.

When it was all dry I used an old vintage flour sifter to separate the finer acorn flour from the chunkier acorn flour.  This worked quite well and so I have 2 tupperware containers full of acorn meal.  One is finely sifted and would be suitable for flour substitute.  One is coarser and would hide well in some cookies or something that you may expect an odd crunch or two per bite. 

Now experiment 2 is finished.  I am proud to say I have a pretty good supply of a fine acorn flour, full of nutrients found in nuts...and ready to bake with.  There have been several times through this journey that I have questioned my own sanity and I am pretty sure my family has questioned it a few times.  In fact my mother heard from my sister that I picked up the acorns from her yard with the intention of eating them and my mother's comment was "you are either really hungry or really crazy!"  But without some experimentation, I will not know what works and what does not.  Acorn nuts.. not sure if I will try this again in the near future.

But I do have 2 containers in the freezer of flour substitute.  It is not poisonous.  It does not have gluten and supposedly works well in recipes if you substitute no more than 1/4 of the flour with the acorn flour.   I have read that if you use too much acorn flour in the recipe your baked good will be crumbly. 

I still owe you a report back on the ending of the acorn experiment so be watching for Part 3..  when I actually use it in a large quantity in a baked item.  I will let you know about the taste and texture and whether my family had a fit or not when I fed it to them.  Don't tell but I put a handful of the acorn flour into my home made flour tortillas tonight and fed them to my daughter and the neighbor girl.  (hehehe).  Neither of them seemed to notice and they gobbled up their burritos..  I win thus far!  Stay tuned!