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Wild Edibles

Acorn Flour

February 3, 2014
Acorns and oak leaves lying on the ground on green grass

-By Daniel Bieber (Updated 2024)

So, what does a forager do at this time of year? Well, even though there are still a few edible species to be harvested, much of my energies have been concentrated on making flour and baking. My main ingredient is the acorn. During October and November I was out and about gathering bags full of these abundant wild nuts.

At that time they are rather hard to open as the shells clung to the nut meat. (You can read our post on our best way to shell acorns here.) However, after a few weeks of drying, they open more easily. Once I have a nice pile of shelled acorns, the next task is to remove the tannins that make them taste so bitter. The easiest way to do this is by boiling the chopped nuts in several changes of water until they become more palatable. At this point I put them on trays in the oven and dehydrate them. The final stage is to grind them to a powder. I’ve found that a coffee grinder does the trick pretty well.

This year, I decided to experiment with baking. I used my acorn flour to make empanadas, fruit and nut cookies, date nut bread and an apple pie for Thanksgiving. They were all a big success. So much so, in fact, that I’ve made several batches of cookies since.  A nice thing about acorn flour is that it contains no gluten, so my cookies are ideal for anyone with celiac disease or a gluten allergy.

I had also gathered a lot of black walnuts and shagbark hickory nuts, which I  used in the cookies and acorn bread, so not only were they delicious but really nutritious.

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