![]() But acorns are technically edible, and not just for squirrels. Then I brought the meal back into the kitchen to try out other applications I brewed acorn coffee (not worth it) and boiled the acorn Most species of oak produce acorns that are laden with bitter tannins, leaving the adventurous eater cotton-mouthed with regret. I ate the meal by the palmful and sprinkled it on yogurt and ice cream. I likened the toasted acorn meal to cocoa nibs in scent, taste, and crunch. The results were tantalizing-an amalgam of nuts, caramel, chocolate, and vanilla. So my next step was to try to impart flavor by dry-roasting the leached meal. Gradually though, the bitter gave way to disappointingly bland. Despite the loss of color and scent with each rinse, the acorn meal was stubbornly bitter. The first soak turned the water a beautiful creamy orange with a faintly nutty smell and a taste that was less bitter than I had expected. Using hot water shortened the leaching time. My final capitulation was to give up the idea of only cold-water rinses, which I thought would maintain more flavor and nutrition in the nuts. I used wood ash from my wood-burning stove as lye before switch-ing to store-bought pickling lime. At first, I aspired to keep the acorn meat as intact as possible, but leaching tannins became a weeklong process so I settled on food-processing the acorns into a coarse meal prior to leaching. Autumn of 2014 was a mast season for oaks in Northeast Ohio, and with about 60 gallons of acorns, surely I was going to be satiated by my oak tree, if only I knew what to do with them. Then, as if by coordinated effort, the oaks would overwhelm the remain-ing hungry squirrels, satiating them while leaving plenty of acorn leftovers to regenerate oak forest. ![]() Theory explains why, during lean acorn years, populations of acorn predators- say, squirrels-would shrink due to the dearth of food. Oak trees exhibit the phenomenon called masting, whereby the individual trees in an area produce few seeds for multiple years, followed by a bumper crop for a season. In late October, when my tree had shed most of its acorns, I raked the inch-long, velvety oak nuts into a pile nearly filling a 32-gallon garbage can, with a pile of similar volume outside. And if people across the northern hemisphere, from antiquity to today, can eat oak seeds, then so can I. He speculates that these first food pro-cessors were perhaps grinding acorns. In his book, Oak: The Frame of Civilization, William Bryant Logan points out that tools for grinding grain have been found in archeological digs near oak groves where evidence for wheat or other grain is lacking. ![]()
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