ACORNS: Collecting, Most Common Questions, and Other Stuff

hello today we're gonna do something unusual which is we're gonna pick up acorns as you can see there are a lot of acorns out here under this tree while talking about acorns so you guys have something to watch while I'm talking this is not going to be a direct how-to hands-on video but it's going to serve an important purpose which is to talk about common questions things like our acorns poisonous can use the leech water from acorns to tan hides and stuff like that and also go over just talking points about using acorn some thoughts on using acorns as a staple like what you should do to get started and some excellent resources that I'm going to refer you to that will help you get started with acorn processing and actually go far with it as to whether I'll do an actual acorn processing video later we'll see props here some baskets some of which I made which I'll be talking about and the technology around traditional acorn processing by California Indian people so I think before I get really going here on anything else I just want to talk about picking up acorns and how you kind of go about grading them because a lot of the acorns will be bad if I want good acorns that I'm gonna keep and eat I want and you know nothing with bugs in it so I'm gonna look for certain things like discolorations miss shapen acorns that are kind of lumpy like this one just doesn't look right right right away just looking at it there's like a dark area here and it's kind of lopsided now that doesn't mean that it's bad for sure but that's the kind of thing I'm scanning for in fact this one looks like it very well might be good you won't always be able to tell if they're good or not but you can sort them later because as you dry them the bugs will actually start to come out and you'll see the holes and it just becomes more obvious and since you're rolling them around all the time and maybe like turning him in the Sun or whatever you can kind of keep sorting them over and over again until you just have good ones so look for lopsidedness look for dark spots that could be bug holes look for acorns that haven't developed right that they're kind of crooked which means that they probably have a bug in them another thing I look for is right when the acorns fall out they'll have this bright white light colored spot here where the acorn cap has released from it now acorns that go bad on the tree early this will be dark it doesn't mean that if this is why you definitely have a good acorn but if it's really dark and you're in the main drop like we are now I mean you're gonna hear acorns falling then you want to you know get ones with this kind of bright white color as far as the mechanics of that go I'm going to pick up acorns and kind of like off and I'll roll them a little bit in my hand to just like look at I'm really quick and I'm you know I'm gonna miss a lot of stuff but it's just like this little pre-screening thing like that one just didn't look right I didn't even know exactly what it was about it so a common statement you'll find is that acorns are poisonous and you have to leech them that's a little bit of an exaggeration the stuff in there is tannic acid it's a very common thing to find in plants seeds you know it's the stuff that makes tea kind of puckery like that kind of dry feeling in your mouth it's in red wine it's in coffee it's an important flavor component and also kind of a mouthfeel component because it it changes the experience of eating by the actual mouthfeel so for instance a dessert apple is not something you'd think to have a high tannin content if you took all the tannin out you'd find that they felt pretty flat if he took the tannin out of red wine it would be terrible if you took the tannin out of hard cider you know apple cider again you know our tea it's all part of the experience so it's not poisonous anything in quantity is a poison you know if you take enough of it I'm sure you could do yourself some damage obviously certain animals are able to eat a lot more and then others like you know a deer or squirrel giri tons of brush that's are super-high in tannin you know that you could tan leather with and again with the acorns you know squirrels can just eat this stuff all day I think we would we would have a problem with that but in order to use them as a real food yeah we we need to remove most of the tannic acid now that's accomplished by washing it out because it's water-soluble you basically by whatever means there's a lot of different ways to do it you might be doing it with whole acorns you might be doing it with you know pounded sifted flour but you're gonna run water repeatedly through the Acorn to take the tannic acid away since it's water-soluble and it's very water soluble that it really isn't that difficult it's just can take some time and we'll talk more about methods for that presently this tree produces almost every year pretty much every year but not like this and that's because it's really happy this trees growing out in the open gets Sun on all sides it has plenty of water this is where I tan leather so I'm always dumping like hide water under here without has a lot of nutrients in it for plants and lime and we've dumped a lot of wood ashes down here and stuff like that and in the past this landscape was managed to an extent to encourage food plants like this and control insects and stuff there are many many species of Oaks as I recall when I looked it up recently there was about 600 worldwide wow that's a lot of species of Oaks right where I live right now there are probably five to six maybe even more species of Oaks within 10 miles not all of them were favored for food but as far as I know they're all edible don't quote me on that I'm just saying as far as I know you can quote me on saying that just don't quote me saying that none of them are inedible here's a great example of a bad acorn with messed up and those species of Oaks are acorns very a great deal and the amount of tannic acid that they have so while this one particular one can oak was used a lot for food it actually is one of the higher ones for a tannin content so it does have a lot of tannin it can be challenging to leach it all out typically processes for this particular one use warm water there are others that are much less bitter but they aren't necessarily also always as good if you were to ask a large number of people in California who processed acorns most of them would probably say black oak is their favorite and that's Clark escola guy it's a pretty widespread species and it can be really productive although in this environment it's not nearly as productive as the tan Oaks so can you tan leather with the rinsing x' from the acorns which you know obviously contain the tannic acid I mean the shorter answer is definitely yes but there's a potential problem there you need the solution to be of a certain strength and that's because you want the hide to be preserved while it's tanning you don't want it to kind of you know rot in the liquor while it's in there before it's tanned and while tannic acid is preservative its preservative in concentration right if you dilute it enough it's not really preservative at all so the problem with making acorns is that you keep changing the water constantly so you're gonna let's say you made flour and you made a basin and you pour some water through it's kind of like making coffee you think of it that way and you're you're taking some of the tannic acid out and then you add some more water and take some more out well each of those rinsing ziz not going to be very strong and they're going to get progressively weaker because of that I think you know it's probably not a very practical way to tanah hide but you certainly could and you might get away with it with a small hide that tans really fast one possibility of something that might work is that you could take the same water and keep pouring it back through because once that tannic acid is in the water it's not really gonna kind of go back into the nut beats really like at some point you're gonna have to switch and start using clean water but I wouldn't be surprised if you could pour that water back through you know eight or ten times and concentrate it that way you could all so save all that and you know put all the batches of water together and then concentrate them by cooking you know cook it down until it's stronger but in general I would say you could probably do it and it might be fun experiment but it's not going to be the best way what you'd be much better off doing is taking the whole eight horns and just crushing them up shells and all even the caps together and then cooking that into a liquor like simmering it for hours and you know maybe you could end up with something edible out of that but I I kind of think it's not going to be the best way to process your acorns for food the tannic acid is plentiful in the world there's a lot of it it's usually not that hard to find if you have oak trees you have a bark you have you know trees that die lens that fall off or break off in storms and you can use all that stuff to can weather too so this is an analysis of the California Valley Oak the valley white oak quercus lebara and it says dry meal is 5.7 percent protein 18.6 percent fat and 65 percent carbohydrate so that's a lot of good stuff and not you know that much fiber food value per pound I assume this is calories 2,180 so that's you know that's real favorable if you ate a pound of a corn meal and today you're pretty much set I have read analyses other analyses of different California acorns and I'm sure you can find that information some of it must be available online I'm sure the analysis has been done many times by different people and is available somewhere this book is really great you can read it online for free VK chestnut it's not chest nut it's chess nut without it extra tea what do you do right now if you want to try processing acorns it's fall it's a little bit late some places and you know ideally like I would get out here a month ago and start beating these acorns off the tree as soon as I could get them off ripen up and dry them because early in the season there's more Sun and it does take some effort to get these things dry if you're gonna eat them in quantity like say you know you're really interested in this as a staple or survival food you want to get them dry in the shells because this shell is a really great little package you know protecting package for the Acorn so if you can dry them in the shells they're much easier to store and keep away from bugs so let's say that you wanted to eat these year-round or as a major staple you're gonna go out in the fall as soon as you can get them off the tree or as soon as the good ones start falling because first you get the bad ones so bad ones start falling off and first and the trees just kind of rejecting and it's like well I'm not gonna put any more effort into this one because it's no good and you're gonna lay those in the Sun or in a warm place like an upstairs attic that's really warm the front of your car you could lay them out and on a warm floor you could put them in racks above your wood stove I've done all of these things but you want to get them dry pretty quick you know and some species are easy to draw in some aren't you know some you can practically just leave them around and it kind of dry on their own if they have a thin shell this one is particularly difficult to dry actually because the shell is so thick it's got this really thick woody shell and then once they're dry you know you just need to keep them away from mice mostly and keep them dry what you're gonna do basically is once or twice a week it's gonna be like baking day and you get out you know some acorns in the shell you crack them you process them all you make bread you make meal etc and then you eat that for a few days until it's time to make another batch so doing it that way it's you know fairly efficient although it is a bit of a process well you know if the infrastructure is there and you have it down and you make a lot at once and you do it that way then it's really not as horrible as you might think for instance you could say well wheat is much easier because all you have to do is grind it well do you I mean assuming you're producing it yourself you had to grow it now if you want to talk about a big deal there's a big deal then you have to harvest it dry it Thresh it which under primitive situation you know conditions is a bunch of work you got a bead on it for a while and then you have to you know winnow it all to get rid of the fluffy stuff but you don't want to eat you know it's adds up right and like I said this year it's a little late in the fall to be starting but it's definitely not too late if you have a nice warm house and a place to dry them you can go out and pick up what's available right now you want to get them soon you want to get them before they start sprouting like when they really get wet and rained on they're gonna start to germinate inside and that changes everything it's gonna convert the starches to sugar so get them you know when they're still just off the tree and dry them okay I'm gonna pick up a few more acorns here just to have some drying and for a project I want to work on which I'm not going to tell you what it is because I have a habit of starting projects and not finishing there we're saying I'm going to do them and not doing them I just won't put you through that but today later or tomorrow or soon I'll sit down and talk about these tools and how they're used and just outlined kind of a basic traditional process and then maybe a modern process that you could try out as well [Applause]

Channel: SkillCult

Views: 7,262

Rating: 4.9575596 out of 5

Keywords: SkillCult, Steven Edholm, Prepping, Survival, Self Reliance, Homesteading, foraging, acorns, tan oak, processing acorns, collecting acorns, wild foods, wildcrafting, survival foods, how to eat acorns, are acorns poisonous, can you make leather with acorns, tanning acorns, tanning, tannic acid

Id: 0_2rDwq1Qpo

Length: 14min 43sec (883 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 03 2019