The Tale of an Acorn

Back when we could still wear short sleeved t-shirts outside, we spend some afternoons gathering acorns nearby.

I read that it's possible to make acorn flour and thought, why not? It's been a while since I indulged a completely unnecessary experiment.

When I say we spend a couple afternoons, it was because I made the rookie mistake of picking the green acorns instead of the brown. After we spend some hours de-shelling the acorns we gathered that day, we found out that we needed to use the brown ones and had to with a couple off weeks before we went back.

Acorns need to go through quite a long process before you can actually eat them. They contain a lot of tannin, and I am sure you could get a mean stomach ache, if you ate them unprocessed. First they need to boil, then you need to dry them (I did this in the oven), and to make flour you obviously need to mill the dried acorn pieces (or as I did: use a very good food processor). After all this work, we ended up with around 250 g of flour, which doesn't sound of much, but it was enough to make a couple of batches of acorn cookie during the fall. I used a normal short bread recipe and replaced half the normal flour with our the acorn flour.

I was wondering if the taste would be worth all the work, and even though it is not the best cookie I've ever had in my life, it was really unlike anything I ever tried - not at all bad, but very sweet. So I won't reject that I would go through the same laboursome process when next years fall when the ground once again will fill up with acorn en masse.