Acorns

A wonderful thing to forage for in autumn are acorns. There are so many kinds of oak trees and therefore so many kinds of acorns. All acorns are edible but they are also full of tannins and need to be well prepared before eating.

Last year I fiddled around soaking & cooking acorns from the park, only to find that they were too hard to work with and way too much trouble.

This season I've learnt that the evergreen oak acorns are sweeter and much easier to process. They also taste amazing- so sweet and like a mix of caramel and toffee flavours!

Amazingly there are loads of these trees in parks all around town.

Quercus Ilex. There are a few varieties of evergreen oaks, but these ones are great and easily accessible.

They fall to the ground when they're ready. 

They look just like any other acorn.

I had a go at cracking them just picked, but they were very hard and when I tasted the nut they had that familiar tannin taste- astringent and not good to eat.

However, once baked in the oven for 20-25 minutes the tannins disappeared, the nuts cracked easily but were still soft inside and great to work with.

This was a good colour to end up with.

At this stage they are still easy to chop up. I then processed them in small batches in an old coffee grinder, until pretty finely ground.

This topping for a feijoa crumble worked really well.

I added 1/2 cup of chestnut meal, 1/2 cup of ground acorn meal, a cup of white spelt flour, 1/3 cup of brown sugar & enough butter rubbed in to make it all moist but crumbly.

 The extra made these biscuits- crisp and delicious.

 Here is the acorn meal with some toasted ground Linden seeds. The Linden seeds really do taste like chocolate.

 This small batch of biscuits were made as a basic shortbread- 1/3 cup of acorn meal, a 1/3 cup of ground almonds, 3/4 cup of white flour (spelt), 1/2 cup of brown sugar and 100 grams of butter. Add a tsp of vanilla essence if you like.
Cream the butter and sugar, stir in the flours. Chill  for an hour or so & then roll out, cut and bake in a moderate oven for around 20 minutes.

 This same mixture made the most brilliant pie crust for pumpkin pie- recipe here.

There's so much more to explore about acorns and oaks. They are delicious and so worth the effort to prepare.I am not sure yet about their keeping qualities, but using them in their season right now has been an excellent idea.

One other thing I have made with them- is a jelly.

After reading Kiva Rose's post just here about using acorns, I simmered a handful of toasted acorns in water to make a hot drink. I loved the flavour and decided that the liquid would make a wonderful jelly. Sweetened with honey and set with good gelatine- truly delicious.

Katie X