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nafex - Re: [NAFEX] Edible Acorns

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  • From: "Donna &/or Kieran" <holycow@cookeville.com>
  • To: "North American Fruit Explorers" <nafex@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [NAFEX] Edible Acorns
  • Date: Sat, 15 Sep 2007 09:22:57 -0500

"Most acorns require repeated
leeching over the course of hours or days. "

My response:
I have used acorns from white oak, chestnut oak, and English white oak, and all of them took a matter of minutes to wash off the tannins once they had been ground or zapped in a blender.

"As for taste, "chestnuts are a real treat roasted and
eaten on their own". No one will ever say that about
an unleeched acorn."

My response:
No one raves much about raw rhubarb either, but I have met people who were crazy about rhubarb pie. In fact, I don't know anyone who grows wheat or oats, presumably because they require threshing and grinding or rolling before use, and they don't taste all that great if you just put them in your mouth and chew them up. That doesn't stop wheat from being a major staple food. Apparently aronia berries are pretty awful before juicing, but that doesn't stop NAFEXers from being interested in them and using them, nor does it stop the large scale cultivation of Aronia for commercial use in Europe.
I have actually read where people were asking if they could buy acorn flour anywhere, we are talking commercially, meaning that the equipment would exist for leaching the flour. Any commercial production of any agricultural product is predated by those who dabble and experiment in growing and processing the product. That means people like us.
The fact is that acorns are pretty easy to collect or to grow and to process. They taste quite good in baked goods, much better than chestnuts in fact. I have 4 youngish chestnut trees and look forward to all the chestnuts I want. In the meanwhile the woods are full of oak trees, plus I have young burr oak grafts thanks to Lucky. Acorns may not be quite as handy as chestnuts for some purposes, but flavorwise chestnuts are not a substitute for acorns in other applications.
I have room for both chestnuts and acorns. I have hopes for the chestnut trees, but fears also as the bud mite is headed my way. I like to hedge my bets, and having a nice selection of large nutted oak trees sounds to me like a good way to go. Personally, I like to think of us NAFEXers as pioneering new crops and new selections, but there is the possibility that the world as we know it may come to an end. I'd like to think that my patch of crummy clay would serve as a food source for me and even more so for people after me. I have encountered so many tiny Edens in my life, places where food falls from trees year after year even in this awful climate with it's depleted soils. I want to leave a little Eden for someone else, a place where my oaks tower and drop vast amounts of food, where sacks can be filled with chestnuts, where persimmons lie thick and sweet on the ground, where pears hang thick on the trees and huge overgrown blueberry bushes are alive with birds and small boys. Donna







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