Acorn Recipes and Resources (2024)

FAQs

What food can be made with acorns? ›

Acorns can be ground to make flour for bread, pancakes, pastries, cookies and even pasta. If you plan to do this, it's best to leach with cold water to preserve the starch and help the dough hold together better. If you're going to keep your acorns whole, or at least chunky, you can leach them with boiling water.

For those who think it would take many trees to produce enough flour for even a small batch of pancakes, it surprisingly doesn't take many acorns at all. It takes about 3 cups of acorn meat to yield 1 cup of flour. Once the acorns have been shelled, place them in a blender and add water to cover.

You'll want to leach your acorns to draw out the tannins. Bring two large stockpots to a boil. Pour the acorns into one pot and let it boil until the water turns dark, usually about 15 minutes. Carefully transfer the acorns to the second pot of boiling water and boil the nuts for about 15 minutes.

How to Use Acorns. Acorns can be used in a variety of ways. They can be eaten whole, ground up into acorn meal or flour, or made into mush to have their oil extracted. Once you've safely leached the tannins from your raw acorns, you can roast them for 15 to 20 minutes and sprinkle them with salt for a snack.

Like hazelnuts and walnuts, acorns are an edible, nutritious food for human consumption. You can forage, leach, and prepare acorns for a simple snack or make an acorn meal for baking.

One of the easiest ways to cook acorns is to roast them. Place the damp nut chunks on a baking sheet and sprinkle with fine salt. Toast them for 15-20 minutes at 375 degrees in a pre-heated oven, or roll them around in a dry frying pan over the camp fire.

White oak, red oak, and burr oak acorns are available in bulk for animal food, crafts, and planting. Prices range from $2 to $5 per pound (60 to 80 acorns per pound) plus shipping.

Raw acorns are very bitter and gritty and must be processed prior to eating. Acorns that are leached or roasted are nutty and sweet. For some people, the taste of leached acorns is similar to that of boiled potatoes. While many oak species give bitter-tasting acorns, some produce sweeter nuts like European white oaks.

To do this, the acorns were dried for one year, shelled, winnowed to remove a thin inner shell, pounded into flour, sifted repeatedly through finely-woven baskets, leached by rinsing in water, then cooked into a mush like grits.

Is it safe to eat acorns raw? ›

Raw acorns are considered unsafe due to their tannins, which are toxic if consumed in high amounts. However, you can remove the tannins by boiling or soaking. Properly prepared acorns are perfectly edible and full of nutrients like iron and manganese. Delicious roasted, they can also be ground into flour.

Place acorn pieces in a jar of cold water and leave it in the refrigerator for a day or two until the water turns brown. Replace the water with fresh cold water and continue until the acorns are no longer bitter. Natural tannin-leaching occurs in the wild.

Acorns charges monthly membership fees, starting at $3 per month. Even though it is a very easy way to get started investing, if you don't make enough purchases each month to round up and set aside enough money, the monthly fee could outweigh the benefit.

Generally, the best acorns to harvest are those of the white oaks, such as the swamp oak, Oregon white oak, and burr oak, as they contain less bitter tannin. Luckily, nearly all acorns can be made usable with natural processing which renders them nutty and sweet.

Acorn Baskets

After collecting acorns, tribe members will shell the acorns and crush their flesh within the acorn basket, making flour. A tribe member will then leach, or wash, the acorn flour in their basket, removing yucky tasting tannins. Finally, tribe members cook the acorn flour with fresh water, in the basket!

Raw acorns are very bitter and gritty and must be processed prior to eating. Acorns that are leached or roasted are nutty and sweet. For some people, the taste of leached acorns is similar to that of boiled potatoes. While many oak species give bitter-tasting acorns, some produce sweeter nuts like European white oaks.

Acorns were typically roasted to kill off any bugs and, after shelling, ground with a mortar and pestle or milling stone, then sifted into a fine flour. Native people used water to leach tannins from the flour to prepare it for use in a porridge-like mush, soups, and breads.

Among others, there are records of the ancient Greeks, Iberians, Japanese and English eating acorns, especially during times of famine when grains were unavailable. Contemporary Native American and Korean cooking incorporates acorns in beautiful dishes that you can still find today.