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