Can i cook acorns

If it is hot out, lay the cookie sheets in the sun. When partially dry, coarse grind a few acorns at a time in a blender. Spread the ground acorns to dry on cookie sheets, then grind again in a blender. Repeat until you are left with a flour- or cornmeal-like substance. Break egg into bowl and add all ingredients, beating to create a batter. If batter is too thick, thin with additional milk.

Pour batter onto hot, greased griddle and cook slowly until brown. Flip to brown opposite side. Serve with butter and syrup or jam—and enjoy! I have been boiling the acorns for several hours, rotating between pots to keep using fresh water. The water still turns brown after several minutes. How long should I keep doing it? My dogs and pigs have been eating acorns that have fallen on the ground. Is this OK? I heard that it cac damage their kidneys.

We already reduce habitat, and share little of our fruit and vegetable gardens with wildlife. Can we at least leave them the acorns? Many depend on them to get through the months when no other food is available. Most areas with acorns have more than enough for the animal life, including a human or two. One huge oak can drop up to 10, acorns. If you own oaks, the acorns can blanket the ground in a mast year.

Fortunately, the United States is blessed with roughly 58 species of native oaks. The best thing you can do if you have oaks on your property to increase yield is manage them. Keep any oaks and other nut trees thinned and healthy. Crowded stands of tall trees block the sun and squelch mast production.

Nut trees with crowns fully exposed to light are healthier and produce better than those with shaded foliage. Thin medium-height trees, too, so light can strike the ground and encourage growth of lower foliage important to ground-dwelling creatures for cover and nesting. I told her that she should soak them in water to get rid of the tannin out of them first who is right or does it matter.

I live in Northern Arizona where we have a plethora of scrub oaks. I noticed that they produce acorns every year, or at least what looks like acorns. Do you think they are edible and should this same process be used?

Great question, Cynthia. The answer is yes. All acorns are edible though some are probably more palatable than others.

And all acorns need to be leached of their bitter tannins. Here are two articles: one about scrub tree acorns and the other from a fellow from Tuscon, Arizona. This was a learning experience for me. We live in a Black Oak forest so have many Acorns this year. I read all I could and made plenty of mistakes. Having reached the ground, the acorns can grow into new oak trees or be carried off to new locations by wildlife.

Our A-Z guide to British trees from native species to naturalised and widely planted non-natives. Are acorns edible? And other acorn facts. Public enquiries officer. Leaching Acorns can be ground to make flour for bread, pancakes, pastries, cookies and even pasta. Shell your acorns. This can be fiddly and some claim it helps if you freeze them first, or use acorns collected in previous years. Soak the shelled acorns in hot or cold water. Once the water turns brown, drain it off and soak again in fresh hot or cold water.

Repeat this process until the water is clear. Did you know? Roasted acorns For those who enjoy a savoury snack, salted nuts are the perfect choice. After hot water leaching, place the damp chunks onto a baking tray and sprinkle with salt.

Toast for mins on a high heat. Cool and consume! Acorn coffee Acorn coffee is naturally caffeine free. Leach with hot water, then lay the acorns out in an ovenproof dish. Move the acorns around the dish regularly to stop them catching. The acorns will start to turn brown as they dry - you can choose whether you want a light or dark roast. Dry the resulting acorn meal in a low temp oven for a few minutes, or air dry for a few hours. Then grind it again. This acorn flour can be used to bake breads or almost any other baked good.

Using the flour described above, try your hand at cookies. You could follow any cookie recipe, swapping out the wheat flour for acorn flour. Since acorn flour is more crumbly than wheat flour, cookies are a natural fit for this wild food. My favorite are acorn peanut butter cookies. The butter will cooperate better if it softens up to room temperature before mixing, so set the butter out first.

Mix the flour, salt and baking soda in a small bowl, and set it aside. Mix the softened butter and peanut butter in a large bowl. Add the vanilla and both sugars to the butter mixture, and mix it well.

Add the eggs and mix again. Stir the flour mixture into the butter mixture until smooth. Roll the dough into balls and pat out onto an ungreased baking pan. Bake at degrees for 10 minutes or until lightly brown. Makes 4 to 5 dozen cookies. Place chunks of leached acorn on a cookie sheet and roast them in the oven at F for about 30 minutes.

This roasting time will depend on the moisture in the nut pieces more moist acorns need more time. Trust your eyes and nose when making acorn coffee, and stay right next to the oven.

When the pieces are dark brown and give off a roasted but not a burned smell, they are done. My method is to run the damp, leached acorns through an old-fashioned, hand-crank meat grinder. Spread the damp nut meal back on a cookie sheet and allow it to dry completely. If you have a wood stove, place it at the the base and stirred occasionally until it is bone-dry—this will take two days or so.

You can also do this in a dehydrator or in a conventional oven at degrees Fahrenheit until the meal is bone-dry. If you store the flour even slightly wet, it may mold and all your hard work will end up in the compost pile.

The end result will be a very coarse flour. This can be used as-is, or it can be run through a flour mill or coffee grinder to produce finer flour for baking.

Either way, you can now store it in an airtight container and use it at your leisure! By this point, you are undoubtedly hungry, and rightly so. As an ingredient, you can think of hot-leached acorn flour in a vaguely similar way to cornmeal.

Taste-wise, acorn flour is nutty, earthy, sweet, and reminiscent of maple or molasses. The hot-leach method results in a dark brown flour that will give a pumpernickel-like color to whatever you mix it in. So with all those factors in mind, let me share some ideas on how to make it into delicious food! I find that I use far less flour in the summer than I do in the winter.

Porridge deserves more time in the limelight as a delicious breakfast option. Add a pinch of salt, a handful of raisins, and a knob of butter to make it something special.

Served with a side of wild berries and a drizzle of home-tapped maple syrup, you can prove to both yourself and your breakfast guests that wild food is the best food in the world. Roasted until fragrant and simmered for 15 minutes, coarse-ground acorn flour can be brewed into a rich, coffee-ish drink that is comforting on its own and delectable with some sweetened, spiced milk. This is just a tiny sampling of all the possibilities that await the home cook with a jar full of acorn flour.

This fall, I hope you take the chance to forage, process, and truly enjoy this amazing, free ingredient! My ducks, chickens, and goats have all relished eating acorns and acorn grubs in the fall. The ducks and goats can handle them raw and unshelled as they fall from the tree, but the chickens need them smashed before they can get the nutmeats out.

I have no experience with feeding them to other livestock, so my knowledge is limited to the effect on cows, sheep, or horses. All the same, acorns offer another self-sufficient option to the homesteader hoping to provide for their animals needs directly from their own land, rather than being entirely dependent on the feed store.

Hank Shaw is another name for those interested in foraging to remember. His recipes using acorns are positively amazing-looking. Another place worth investigating is this excellent post by another homesteader also turning acorns into a diet staple for her own family.

Practical Self-Reliance is full of excellent ideas, including acorn pasta and acorn cheese! For those foragers out there closer to the foodie side of the spectrum, Pascal Baudar is your man. He has been transforming wild foods into super-fancy epicurean delights with a fervor that needs to be seen to be believed. Still researching to find out. No need to leach them to feed livestock!

We feed raw acorns to our animals every year. Research on this is a bit dodgy—I have found that a lot of websites online have conflicting information on whether or not acorns are good for animals. But the wild animals eat them every year, and happily.