Acorns - at this time of year there are tonnes of them (excluding last year when the rotten weather ensured there was little of anything). The oak is one of our most well known trees, not just here but throughout Europe and North America. Despite that, the abundant crop of acorns is rarely used as a food source. There was a time, hundreds of years ago, when acorns were fed to pigs to fatten them up in the autumn, though generally, pigs were released into woodland to feed on a variety of nuts, fruit and roots. We don't have any pigs but we have goats so I fed them a handful of acorns this morning. Seconds later they spat them out.
So, having failed to use them as a feed for livestock, my next aim is to use acorns in cooking. There aren't many recipes about but in the past I have had a go at making acorn flour to use in bread baking. I'll give that a go again but I am on the outlook for other acorn recipes. Any suggestions?
5 comments:
I've never tried cooking with them before but have heard it's a pain to get all the tannins out to make them edible. No doubt it's due to its bitter taste that your goats spat the acorns out.
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Hello, I follow the blog above as well as yours, and if you have a look at the post by Mrs. Homegrown on 24th of this month, they talk about acorns and there's a link for a recipe. Hope it helps!
they are bitter. if there is some trick to diminish it, would be great. acorns in our area were used in times of wars and great hunger when there was nothing to eat. also a "fake coffee" was made from it.
The only time I used acorns as an ingredient in cooking was when I made them into flour for bread making. I had to boil them for ages to get rid of as much of the tanin as possible. I was left wondering whether it was worth it but I am still keen to experiment.
Do be careful if you're thinking about using acorns for food. There's a good reason why historically Europeans haven't used acorns for food and the Americans have. Their oak trees are a totally different variety from ours and their acorns don't have the high tannin levels so they don't have to spend days processing them as we would do. Acorns for European humans are starvation food - think German acorn coffee during the war. It's easier to find a pig keeper and offer them the acorns. It's a shame, because there's a bumper acron harvest this year.
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