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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.

Black background, sitting on a sturdy brown woodblock is a silver bowl filled to the brim with pea-green little acorns. Some still have their grey caps while others have fallen off to reveal bright sunflower-yellow tops. So cheery!
On a black plate, branches of reddening maple leaves, still partly green, emerge from the top left and bottom right of the image. Centred in a diagonal from bottom left to upper right are colourful potatoes, chopped in quarters and splayed out like flowers. A yellow potato, a purple potato and a white potato. On top middle top of the potatoes, like the head of a flower is a round dollop of acorn miso sauce. Surrounding the potatoes are flattened spheres of sissoo-ezu. This version of sissoo-ezu was basically, dried sissoo leaves ground to powder and mixed with silken tofu and tiny bit of mustard and vinegar.
Black dish, black background, three white camellia flowers triangulate the composition on the dish. Six small pancakes the size of cookies are arranged in neat rows. Three on the top, two in the middle and one at the bottom. An inverted pyramid. On top of the of the mini pancakes is a dollop of red sauce. The pancakes have been fizzled in diagonal streaks of green sauce. Yuzu zest sprinkles complete this serene image. Acorns change flavour the longer they are heated so I made these pancakes very small so they'd only need to be cooked for one minute on either side. They were really good. The red sauce was just rando fruit and veg at the moment in the garden, mad hatter peppers, yuzu juice, queen of minalco tomatillo, strawberry, and tiny bit of ketchup, pinch salt and sugar. Very tasty. Green sauce was sissoo leaf powder, vegan yogurt, pinch salt and sugar and later mixed a bit of water for drizzle-ability.
Black dish, black background, a pink candy-stripe camellia illuminates from the top right. Below, ccentred on the dish are mustard yellow, thickly cut noodles arranged neatly, except for a few artfully curved for dramatic effect. A young verdant moringa leaf adorns the noodles with a borage flower, like a blue star twinkling brightly at its base. The image is restive and serene. The noodles are made from ground and mushed acorns with soba flour. It is entirely gluten-free. The combination of soba (buckwheat) and acorn tastes remarkably like wheat.
#NativePlants#gardening#cooking
Feb 17, 2023, 05:47 PM·Public·IceCubesApp
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J blue

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.

Black background, sitting on a sturdy brown woodblock is a silver bowl filled to the brim with pea-green little acorns. Some still have their grey caps while others have fallen off to reveal a bright sunflower-yellow top. So cheery! Some of the recently fallen browning acorns may be ok but you will need to deshell them prior to dehydrating to make sure the seed inside is still fresh (yellow-light orange).
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J blue

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).

The image shows a close up of a hand with crushed acorns, their guts spilled out like scrambled eggs. This pic shows what the insides of the acorn look like and how you should not use a hammer or culinary mallet to crack them. The shells and acorns are rather soft. What I use for these acorns is a garlic press. You gently crack it and peel the shell away with the soft part of your finger. Don't be tempted to use your fingernails.
The image shows a blue woven placemat with some green stitching. On top of the placemat is a perfectly cracked acorn revealing the yellowish orange nut.
The image shows a pic of small acorns in various shades of brown on a cookie sheet. In the centre are three orange acorns that have not been dehydrated in the oven to show contrast in colour.
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J blue

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.

A repeat of a previous image. The image shows a pic of small acorns in various shades of brown on a cookie sheet. It is at this stage that acorns can be stored.
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J blue

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.

The image shows acorns in a glass jar. The water is so completely clear that you cannot tell that there is any water in the jar. The acorns are a pale yellowish colour and still have the brown skins. I don't take off the skins bc that's too much work and those skins probably have worthwhile nutrients anyway.
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J blue

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.

Image shows acorns in a blender. I recommend using a blender to chop them up first before mashing.
Image shows acorns after being chopped into small kinerbles.
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J blue

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.

Black plate with emerald fronds of tamarind leaves cascading from the top left, three white onigiri sit, sprinkled with specks of yellow. So clean and quiescent.
A close-up of acorns and umeboshi mashed together into a dry paste in a suribachi bowl.
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J blue

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.

On a black speckled plate, a wild whirligig of branches! To the left are rounded Okinawa spinach leaves at the very bottom. On to top left is a young branch of Mexican tarragon. On the top right is the rose-tinted Red Hopi Amaranth. On the bottom right is a blooming branch of the tarragon, its flowers a sunflower yellow! Sitting over this spiral of verdancy is a broiled rectangle of tofu. The tofu has been coated with a miso acorn dengaku. On top of the dengaku is blooming summer savory, the flowers a pale lavender. Glorious!
Image shows white and red miso cartons on a wood table. Between them is a suribachi bowl of mustard yellow mashed acorns and a stained mustard yellow pestle.
Image shows the combination of the two miso pastes into the suribachi bowl so that it closely resembles the acorn's colour. 2 1/2 Tablespoons white miso, 1 1/2 Tablespoons red miso, 1/4 cup leached willow oak acorns.
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J blue

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.

Blue background, almost black. Laying flat and forward to the viewer is a bamboo mat. Three large mitsuba leaves (like pointed clover) border a small white and blue porcelain cup. Inside the cup is a light egg custard with tiny mitsuba stems sprinkled on top.
This image is downward facing and shows the acorns sitting at the bottom of the little cups in the bamboo basket.
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J blue

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.

Black background, the view looks into a white and blue flattened porcelain bowl. There is a large dark sand coloured ball sitting in the centre. Sitting beside is a malabar flower bud frond. In front are beech mushrooms and to the right are two halves of queen of Minalco tomatillos. The broth is made from ume-flavored kombucha, usukuchi soy, kudzu starch, wild physalis juice and ginger juice.
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Swede’s Photographs

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

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Pauline von Hellermann

@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

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J blue

@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.

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RetroEnthusiast

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

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J blue

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

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RetroEnthusiast

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

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J blue

@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.

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RetroEnthusiast

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

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J blue

@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.

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J blue

@cdarwin maybe borrow a tree shaker from a farmer?

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Chuck Darwin

@jblue Yes, the olive growers use them

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Chuck Darwin

@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.

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p x l s

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

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Rozzychan

@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. 👍

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