From Tree to Table: gathering and processing acorns

hi I'm Arthur Haynes and I'm here today to talk about the fruit of the oak tree the Acorn and there's probably no other wild food in this country that is as underutilized as the Acorn and at the same time with this many misconceptions about it so today I'd like to take time to cut through some of these misconceptions and to help you learn how to gather and process the Acorn into a wild food the Acorn has been an important food around the world and in fact it has been used as a staple on four different continents here in the United States of course it was used in the Northeast the Great Lakes region and in the West in fact it was used anywhere where oak trees were present and produced large enough acorns where they could be efficiently gathered from the landscape in fact it's estimated that in some regions of California where the natives use them there as much as 50 percent of their yearly calorie intake came from the Acorn and with such an important wild food we certainly want to learn how to utilize this species one of the great features of the Acorn is the fact that it has a very thin shell so most of what you gather is usable food compare this to other wild species like hickory walnut or hazelnut these are species that have thick shells and only a small edible kernel on the inside what daunts people what stops him from using this as a food is the fact that it requires processing because the tannins that are found inside of many acorns create a bitter taste and indicate that they shouldn't be eaten without being processed in other words they shouldn't be eaten in their raw form however I'm going to show you one method of several that can be used to process acorns that is relatively easy and though it takes a bit of time there's very little work to do on your part most of it is just waiting for the processing to occur now over most of North America we see two broad groups of Oaks the white oak group and the black oak group and these two groups of Oaks are generally fairly easy to separate and there are a number of differences I'll share just a couple with you now the black oak group tends to have leaves where the lobes are projected into thin bristle points and if the leaf is unload then it's the apex of the leaf that will show a bristle point that contrasts with members of the white oak group which have blunt lobes and wouldn't have any bristle points at the tip or along the lobes now another distinction is the interior surface of the shell members of the black oak group show a yellow brown or orange brown layer of felt like hairs on the interior surface of the shell in other words when you crack it whereas members of the white oak group lack these hair so you see a smooth inner surface of the shell now these two groups of Oaks have some fundamental differences in when we gather and how we process them into food I'll mainly be discussing black oak group for this video but with only a little bit of modification it's fairly easy to use the same method for the white oak group now people mistakenly believe that I seek out members of the white oak group because they taste less bitter however you should be aware that that taste is very deceiving because the white oak group still contains abundant tannins and in fact in my part of the world here in New England the most tannic species is a member of the white oak group and that is Quercus Montana the mountain chestnut oak so in fact I seek out members of the black oak group frequently for a number of reasons one of those is the fact that it's what I have commonly around me and they grow large enough to make themselves efficient to gather and process but there are some other important reasons one they dry more easily than members of the white oak group and as you'll see drying the acorns is an important part of speeding up the processing the shelling of the acorns - they're less prone to spoilage and that's also really important because while I'm processing them in this case with water I don't want to lose the food that I've prepared to spoilage and a third reason that I seek out members of the black Oh group is they have a much longer season of collection the white oak group as they fall from the tree in the fall they have a relatively short collection period because they germinate in the autumn season however the black oak group do not germinate until the following spring which means I have a long period of collection in fact I can gather them any time from fall through the spring so long as the ground is not covered by snow and there are actually other reasons that I seek these out but for brevity I'll keep it there today so once we've identified an oak that is dropping acorns on the ground the first thing we need to understand is these are not all created equal in other words some of them have various facts about them that mean we can't use them as food we want to collect the healthy mature acorns that have the ripe kernel inside and so here are some close-up photographs of some of the things you need to look out for when you're gathering acorns from the ground now here are three visual clues that the Acorn should be discarded for food on the left is an acorn that was actually shed early by the tree because it was defective and you'll notice it is still firmly attached to the quote cap or what a botanist would refer to as an involucre that set of Brax that are all fused together into that cup like structure acorns of most species should come free of that cap when they are mature the one in the center has black streaks on it indicating that it is infected with a fungus and it should be green or at least partly green when it freshly falls from the tree in this part of the world but will mature or aged as a medium brown or a dark brown but shouldn't have streaks of black or other colors indicating that there is a fungus involved and the acorn on the far right you'll notice has a hole that is not an entrance hole but rather an exit hole from a weevil larvae and that is the acorn weevil that consumed the acorn on the interior and then exited when it was done so why eat an acorn anyway well if you were like many people that have a very busy life that acorn is one of the wild foods that in some years can be found in great abundance so it serves as an efficient method of pulling together a large amount of food now I always like to look at my food and buy medicine through a historical perspective in other words through the lens of ancestral use this helps me avoid things that might be detrimental to my health of course the acorn was eaten around the globe and did not generate chronic health effects whereas many of the new foods that we consume today do in fact contribute to the decline of our health so using this filter of ancestral use helps me identify foods that are beneficial to my body now the Acorn does contain vitamins and minerals as you would expect it's rich in calcium potassium and phosphorus as well as it contains a host of B complex vitamins now also the Acorn is a complete protein and contains all eight of the essential amino acids that our body can't generate these are the essential fatty acids that we can make and have to get from our diet now another really important aspect about the Acorn especially members of the black oak group which have a higher lipid content there is a much more beneficial ratio of carbohydrates to fats in the Acorn this means that they do not generate high blood glucose levels and contribute to the formation of diabetes for example whereas white flour is a 72-73 on the glycemic index scale the Acorn is a seven indicating that it does not again contribute to the formation of diabetes as does our major staple here in the United States so once we've gathered the Acorn my first step is usually to wash them all I want to clear off all of the debris whether that's small pieces of dirt or sand or even the leaves and pieces of bark that will get stuck to them I want to make sure that none of that ends up in my food just because we're eating a wild food it doesn't mean I want to eat a lot of debris I wouldn't eat this with my supermarket food and I don't want to eat this with my wild food once that step is taken care of the next step is to get them dry there are a bunch of ways that we can preserve acorns but drying is the least energy intensive because we're going to be drawing them passively and it also enables us to keep them for a very long time consider that the Acorn the part that we eat is inside the shell which protects it from oxidation further compared to say grain or especially flour there's much more mass there's a lot more interior of an which keeps it protected again from oxidizing agents so it actually keeps the nutrition in a dried state much better than a lot of the foods that we would consume drying also facilitates shelling because the kernel inside the acorn shrinks just slightly away from the shell shelling fresh acorns isn't any fun especially if you're shelling a large quantity because the kernel is often welded inside the shell and requires a lot of real nitpicky work to get the kernel out of the shell once dried that's an easy process now depending on what we're going to dry we have a different length of time that we'll need to wait the black oak group is much more permeable to moisture in other words they dry faster if we're talking about the white oak group they're much less permeable to moisture and it can take two or three times as long depending on the size of the acorn and the time of year being really important so these that I've gathered I've got a two and a half gallons or so here the next step is to get these washed and then laid out so I can get them drawing because drying will prevent them from molding and I can keep them for two or three years easily without any loss of nutrition drying acorns is fairly easy there's only a couple of principles you need to consider one make sure that acorns are in one layer in other words we're not going to stack the acorns up on top of each other because we want them all to have access to the drying Sun to we're going to make sure that we bring them inside every night before the dew hits if it's raining we keep them inside in a dry place if we gather these in the early part of the season we can easily dry them in the Sun but as the season progresses we'll need to start using the heat of a wood stove or some other type of heating appliance whatever you use to put the acorns on and you do not need this to be complicated you don't have to necessarily build screens although those are really nice you can use tote lids as I'm using here you could use a tart sheets of bark a hide whatever it is that works for you but you want it to be transportable so you can bring them in it's going to take a couple of weeks from members of the black oak group as you see here this is northern red oak to dry all the way through now that the acorns are dried we need to shell them and there's a great number of ways that you can accomplish this in fact there's even a machine made here in the United States with a large hopper and a crank handle that allows us to crack the acorns open to speed this process up however what I want to do is to show you how easy this is with materials that might be lying around outs are outside your house so that you realize it doesn't have to cost any money when you look at an acorn you'll notice that there is a hard point at one end and this is the style base and what I'm going to do is to put this down against this piece of wood that you see this could be a board or a split log to resemble a board and that will drive into the piece of wood when I hit that with a hammer stone and what that does is by that point driving into the wood the Acorn doesn't sort of spin out and I end up cracking my own fingers and you'll see it's very easy just let the hammer stone drop on to the Acorn and because these acorns have been dried they come out of the shell very easily all I'm going to do is a quick inspection to make sure I've removed all the shell remnants and put that in the cracked pile now with the method that I'm going to be using you don't have to worry about removing this reddish papery skin and that's called the testa if you're interested in the botanical terms that piece of material that's on the outside of the kernel is going to get floated away with the method of processing that we'll be using in just a couple of steps from here now many people note that we have tannins that need to be removed from the acorns and that's not the only anti-nutrient we also have phytic acid to deal with which is found in many grains like Humes nuts and similar fruits phytic acid and tannins both chelate which means they bind with free minerals insert under just subtract and then form an insoluble complex so that we are not able to absorb these parts of our diet which means that they remove nutrition from our body now of course we're eating acorns to derive nutrition so we want to follow the indigenous and be sure that we leech our acorns remember that tannins and phytic acid are present in all acorns even members of the white oak group so we need to be sure that we need all eight boards for food especially if they're going to become a significant part of our diet now water has a number of ways that we get we can use it to remove the tannins we can use cold water or we can use hot water each have their own limitations and their advantages the great thing about hot water is it's quite fast but unfortunately the finished product doesn't stick together so it makes a very poor flower if we want to use the acorns for things like breads or or some type of dough for pizza crust or pie crust and these types of things then we'll want to be sure to cold leach it there are other methods including using lye and clay which I'm not going to be discussing today now for the method of leaching that we're going to use which is cold water we need to reduce our acorns down to a fine particle size and by that I mean meal or preferably smaller flour the finer the particle size the less time and the less volume of water it takes to leach the acorns free of the tannin so that we can use them as a food again there's several different ways that you can do this you can use various types of mortar and pestle x' you'll need something large and sturdy and that's facilitated obviously if you're using something made of stone something that has a scoop in it to hold the material as you pound and grime now most people are going to want to speed this process up so here's an inexpensive corn mill which sold for under $50 something that you can easily contribute with multiple pea for your acorn processing to keep the price down and in fact this is one of the only store purchase tools that I routinely use in my acorn processing what I have to do again is get this ground down fine so I'm simply going to pull my acorns into the hopper and pass them through now sometimes I'll even run them through twice and that is just to make sure that I have a very fine particle size which again speeds up this whole process of leeching the acorns now again we're using cold water for our leaching and we're going to do a method called the slow method I like this too fast because it uses the least amount of electricity and effect the least volume of water but it requires more time any time we're using cold water to leach we're balancing between a volume of water and an amount of time that the water is allowed to stand on the ground material if we have a lot of water going through then we don't have to let it sit very long if we have only a small volume of water then we have to let it sit much longer before we remove that water so taking my ground material I'm going to put it into in this case into a glass bowl so that you can see better what's going on but any type of nonreactive material would be fine you can use wood bark stainless steel porcelain etc and once I've done that I'm going to cover this material with water in fact I'm going to use as much water as this container will hold because I want as much volume in there as I can to start extracting tannins now we can stir this up so that it's all covered with water and when we're finished with this we're simply going to let it sit and as time goes on all of the acorn will settle to the bottom and there will be water on top what I'll do is once at least once a day or sometimes twice often morning and night I'm going to decant this water off the material which I'll show you in just a moment in other words I'm going to pour the water off until I start losing my ground in one and then I'm going to fill it back up with water if you take a look at our bowl with the water in the ground acorn you'll notice two layers now all of the ground material is settled to the bottom and this pale color liquid here is the leachate that we want to discard and the decanting is very very easy all I'm going to do is pour off that water and stop just before I lose my ground ACORN material and then put clean water back in this and again I'm going to do this usually I do it twice a day so morning and night but I only have to do it once a day to avoid spoilage now at first the ground a corner material is going to turn the water yellow and as you pour off the water and add new water and pour it off and add again eventually that water at least with northern red oak and other species that are found here in the Northeast is going to change to a red instead of a yellow and so that you were aware that reddish color will never disappear it's always going to change the color of the water so how do you know when it's done when it's finished leaching well it's easy it's done when it's done now what I mean by this is that I don't like recipes because recipes mean that you have to have a certain amount of water and a certain amount of ground acorn in a certain sized bowl etc and what I want to do is to help people understand concepts because then all the variables can change and you still know when this process is finished in this case I'll know it's done when two things occur a the ground material tastes bland in other words I don't get a bitter flavor anymore indicating the presence of tannins and two there is no a stringent mouthfeel that astringency is what you notice when you get a drying sensation in your mouth that also indicates the presence of tannins so when I have a bland material that doesn't give an astringent mouthfeel I know that I'm done I have leached the tannins free from my acorn material and it's ready to be used as a food now I've taken a moment to set this up so that you can more easily see what's going on this is a batch of ground acorn that has been soaking for about six days that's Maisie like a long period of time especially for a culture that is used to rapid convenience in other words being able to instantly open to open a package and eat food however anyone who has become interested in traditional foods knows that there is preparation that sometimes begins days before we actually consume the meal and it will behoove you to be thinking ahead about your meals so that you can be taking care of anti-nutrients and essentially preparing the food so you can have the maximum nutrition possible so what I'm going to do is simply take a piece of cloth and you'll see why I'm going to use this because it helps me get rid of most of the moisture I'm going to take this leachate that you see here and pour all of that off and what I have left is a little bit of water and the ground acorn material that's all leached I'm going to pour all of that into this piece of cloth just using my fingers to scrape out this material and when I use the cloth force essentially get rid of all of the moisture that I can now this is just a small batch one that happened to be finished so I could show it to you and I'm just going to wring this out and what I have left is this and this is the bleached acorn material that I'm all set to cook with or to turn it into even a raw food product as you see here now if I'm going to cook with this in the next day or two I can simply put it in a cool place that could be a refrigerator and use it but if I'm going to be saving this for a period of time which might be maybe a full of weeks before I'm going to end up using this in cooking then I'm going to dry it and drying is easy it is just set out on a pan put very thin no more than a quarter of an inch thick and it can be set in the Sun brought in at night in the same way that we dry acorns we can set it next to a wood stove or some other heat source oh we can even put it in a commercial dehydrator one thing we don't want to do to this flower until we cook it is to subject it to high temperatures we don't want to dry it in an oven most ovens can only go as low as a hundred and seventy or a hundred and fifty degrees Fahrenheit and then heat it up again when we cook it this multiple heating ends up damaging the polyunsaturated fatty acids the omega-6 fatty acids that are found in the Acorn so keep that in mind dry it's more slowly and more passively if you want to hold on to a cornflower for a period of time before you end up cooking with it otherwise you're ready to go with it now and this can be included in any of the meals that you're preparing well thank you for joining me there are many other methods for processing acorns and to see those you'll simply have to join me in one of my classes during the fall season here in New England I want everyone to keep in mind that the Acorn is a really important wild food and in fact in my household it is probably second only to wild rice in terms of the calories that it provides us through the year as a plant staple acorns are not solely the Providence of the indigenous people of this continent in other words the Native Americans who relied on the Acorn are not the only ones who have this in their ancestry people of Asia and Europe as well of course as North America and northern Africa also have the Acorn as part of their heritage and I encourage you to reclaim that heritage by reconnecting with this wild food

Channel: Arthur Haines

Views: 278,178

Rating: 4.8929667 out of 5

Keywords: Arthur, Haines, wild, food, acorn, acorns, oaks, leaching, nutrition

Id: QitkIGNwUgs

Length: 25min 48sec (1548 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 12 2012

Reddit Comments

[u/wasone]

A really informative video, thank you.

[u/Bernbern123]

Great video! I am going to try this!!!!!