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J blue

Willow oak acorns, Quercus phellos 1/

Surprisingly delicious!

After cold processing, they taste like the smell of fresh hay, wheat and hulled sunflower seeds.

With heat processing, they taste like walnuts with a tinge of bitterness.

This thread demonstrates how to cold-process the acorns and different ways of using them. Read the AltText for more details.

2/ Picking acorns
Unlike other types of acorns, willow oaks are ideally collected when they are bright green and just as soon as they fall. Fortunately (??), acorn fall coincides with the hurricane season so you can just wait for a hurricane to dump a large payload. Just be sure to get to them before the squirrels.🐿️

Acorns should be entirely free from cracks or holes.

3/ Two options. You can first leave them in their shells and sweat them under low heat (150F) in a dehydrator/oven, deshell and dyhydrate again or shell them and dehydrate them under low heat. The first option makes the acorns more likely to come out whole when unshelling.

You need to dehydrate them under low heat or they will not leach tannins. They have finished dehydrating when they turn a caramel color (~2hrs).

4/ Here is a stopping point. You might have to lay out the acorns for a day to completely harden. Once they are like little stones, this is the best point at which to store willow oak acorns. You can keep them dried in a cool dry place or in the freezer. They will last a very long time like this.

5/ It takes two weeks to cold-process acorns. Simply fill a lidded jar halfway with acorns and then fill mostly with water. Shake vigorously. In 12 hours, change the water. You can use the refuse water for plants.

The process should be repeated every 12 hours. The water needs to be changed so the acorns don't ferment. You know they have finished leaching when the water is clear after 12 hours and shaking. The acorns will appear tortilla-colored.

6/ After leaching, the acorns can be stored in the fridge and the water doesn't need to be changed as often.

Now the sky is the limit! Raw, chopped, smooshed, ground. Pickles, noodles, pancakes, sauces, pastes, fillings, pastries, dips... the only limit is your imagination!

Just so long as you don't add heat for too long, they keep their unique taste of fresh hay aroma/wheat/sunfower.

7/ Acorn umeboshi onigiri with yuzu zest.

The acorns and umeboshi here were just ground together and then mashed till smooth in a suribachi bowl. The cooked rice was mixed with yuzu zest after it had finished resting and then the paste was stuffed in. It was really good. The acorns and umeboshi really blended together for a tangy nutty taste.

8/ Acorn dengaku with yuzu zest aromatic.

This is probably my favourite combination of acorn and miso. I adapted it from Tsuji's Japanese Cooking, A Simple Art on p.192. I used kombucha powder and a bit of water instead of making dashi so I could barely heat the acorns before it had the right consistency. I wanted to preserve the nice acorn raw flavour.

9/ Acorn chawan-mushi. This recipe is adapted from "chawan-mushi" from Tsuji's Japanese Cooking. p.214. I put the egg mixture into very tiny cups so I wouldn't have to cook the mixture too long. I wanted to retain the flavour of the raw acorns. The cups were steamed less than 8 minutes on the second tier of a bamboo basket and the acorns tasted very peanut-y here. Was good.

10/
I call this next one Disappointment mushi. Here is what I don't recommend. In the recipe I based this off of, chestnuts are supposed to be dyed with gardenia pods. I tried to dye acorns with Malabar spinach but heat degrades the dye so then I tried annatto seeds but the dye didn't take. So the dumpling looked like a dung beetle ball and the acorns were cooked so long, they tasted like walnuts on the bitter-side.

@jblue I like the bowl. The mushrooms look good. Dumpling aside, it looks pretty 🙂. Your description is comical 😅

@jblue thank you so much for all this! I would love to try this. Also awed by our ancestors (i believe these are old recipies and techniques? Not sure actually) working out ways to detoxify plants, so much labour, science and experimentation involved

@pvonhellermannn thank you for your kind words. All acorns are edible but different oak species are not processed the same way. Some species don’t even need to be leached.

So for willow oak acorns, if you were to eat them raw off the tree, they are quite bitter and sour. The tannins won’t actually hurt you though.

@jblue I like pickling so I'm curious what acorn/nut pickles would be like.

@RetroEnthusiast miso goes great with acorns. So far as I’ve tried anything koji-based seems to work.

@jblue Just so I'm clear, do you dehydrate the acorns and then cold process them?

@RetroEnthusiast yes. They need to be heat dehydrated (140-150F) though or they won’t leach. I tried leaching straight from the shell and it didn’t work.

@jblue Okay thanks. At some point I'd like to try acorns because my father has a ton of oaks around his place.

@RetroEnthusiast cool! Not all acorns are processed the same way and some don’t need leaching. I will do a live oak acorn thread in March when my redbud tree blooms (the flowers are edible). I don’t have many left and I lost a lot in failed experiments. So the live oak acorn recipes will be in larger compositions so the tininess of the acorn recipes don’t look like it’s a recipe for elves.

@cdarwin maybe borrow a tree shaker from a farmer?

@jblue Yes, the olive growers use them

@jblue 👍
Another beautiful #foraging #cooking & #japanese #food #art thread by @jblue

From
5/ It takes two weeks to cold-process acorns. Simply fill a lidded jar halfway with acorns and then fill mostly with water. Shake vigorously. In 12 hours, change the water. You can use the refuse water for plants.

To
8/ Acorn dengaku with yuzu zest aromatic.

@jblue Thanks for this incredible thread and all your other wonderful tips and recipes. Truly inspiring!

@jblue

You are a pro at #alttext I never expected to learn that acorns change flavor the longer they are heated in a text description.
I wanna go try it now. 👍