When you’re a nut fanatic, your love of the subgroup has probably gone well beyond simple cashews and pecans. You know peanuts aren’t actually a nut (they’re legumes). You know what tiger nuts are (also tubers) and how to use them. Maybe you’ve dipped your toe into making homemade nut butter. But are you a true nut head if you haven’t sampled one of North America’s most plentiful and versatile nuts, the acorn? If you’ve been leaving them on the ground for the squirrels, it might be time to reevaluate. Acorns have been an important food source for the indigenous people of North America for millennia, and there’s no reason they shouldn’t be a regular ingredient in your home pantry.
When processed correctly, acorns have a delicious, nutty flavor, ranging from mildly bitter to slightly sweet, depending on the species. It’s a flavor akin to toasted bread or boiled potato. White oaks generally produce the sweetest, most mild acorns, and black oaks the most bitter. Raw acorns can be toxic in large quantities, due to their high tannin content, but when the tannins are removed, they’re perfectly safe to eat. Much like other tree nuts, acorns are high in protein, healthy fats, and antioxidants.
Boiled acorns and acorn flour make delicious additions for super creamy and nutty soups, blending beautifully with cauliflower and simple butternut squash soup recipes, for example. A little acorn flour in pancakes adds a touch of earthy bitterness that pairs well with super sweet maple syrup. Roasted and crunchy, chopped acorns work great in place of hazelnuts or walnuts for a sprinkling on fresh salads, a topping on desserts, or mixed in with cookies or brownies. Once you’ve started down the chipmunk hole, as it were, you’ll find plenty to experiment with.
How to process acorns for eating
While roasted acorns and acorn flour are available for purchase in some areas, they can be hard to find and very costly. Foraging them, on the other hand, while time-consuming, is easy and essentially free. Only brown, fully ripe acorns should be selected. They also need to be free of cracks and holes. When opening a raw acorn, the meat should be yellow in color, not too dark or it could be rotten. To check the health of your foraged acorns, place them in water. If any float, they should be thrown out because the nut may have been compromised.
Once you have healthy, ripe acorns, the most important step is soaking them in hot water to remove the tannins (a process known as leaching). For hot leaching, you add whole peeled nuts into boiling water, drain the brown water, then pour the nuts into another boiling pot until the water clears up and the nuts no longer taste overly bitter. It’s important not to add already heated nuts to cold water because it will make the tannins bind to the nut. Once properly leached, the whole nuts can be left to air dry or roasted in the oven. To make acorn flour, you can pulverize the peeled nuts in a blender with water, then rinse and squeeze out the water until it no longer runs brown. This paste can then be dried in the oven. Whole nuts are also amazing dipped in honey or agave syrup and roasted, for a sweet and simple treat you’ll want to squirrel away for yourself.
