Making Acorn Bread from Foraged Acorns, Part 2

Part 2 in what hopes to be a 3-part Acorn Bread series.

My fiancé liked the acorn bread I baked so much that we agreed to try it again, experimenting with a different leaching method and different flour combinations. For today's acorn bread, we tried a leaching method I gleaned from Jean Heglund's novel, Into the Forest (1996):

I used an old coffee filter to leach it, pouring boiling water through it again and again until the tea-colored liquid that dripped from the filter had turned clear, and the meal tasted mild, almost empty of flavor, like unseasoned beans. I mixed the leached meal with fresh water and simmered it until the mush was soft.

We decided to try using the coffee pot to leach the acorns. I had some doubts about it, since heating the acorns above a certain temperature cooks the starch, and the water would get to near-boiling but not actually boiling––i.e., perhaps not hot enough to fully leach the acorns.

Since we were going to cook the starch anyway, I dried the acorns at a slightly higher temperature, which helped crack the shells. The other benefit of this method is that any maggots hiding in the shells poke their nasty little heads out, so we could easily discard them.

Yuck... larvae poking out of heated acorn shells

After heating the acorns, we had to shell them––still the most tedious part. Another benefit of heating them at a higher temperature, though, is that many of the shells crack. I perfected the art of cracking whole shells with one tap of the hammer, so the process went a little more quickly than the last time.

Once shelled, my fiancé used a small Kitchen Aid food chopper to chop the acorns into a course meal.

He then transferred these chopped acorns into a coffee filter, and placed the filter in our coffee pot.

We then poured a pot of water into the coffee pot and waited, as though we were brewing a regular pot of coffee. The first time we did it, the water turned yellowish; after subsequent water changes, it became more of a clear, rosy brown.

The first pass of hot water over the acorn meal.

We went through about nine changes of water. While it took a little longer to get the same level of blandness in the acorns that I did with the boiling method, this method took far less effort. Some of the acorns still tasted a little tannic, but most were appropriately bland.

We used the same recipe from my last post, except that instead of using wheat flour, I ground some oats into flour and substituted that instead, making a gluten-free recipe.

The resulting bread was a little lighter in color and more crumbly in texture, but absolutely delicious.

Making Acorn Bread from Foraged Acorns

I have been wanting to make acorn bread ever since reading Octavia Butler's novel Parable of the Sower. Acorns have long been a food source in indigenous populations, yet many people tend to avoid using them because preparing acorns for consumption can be very time consuming. Both Green Deane's Eat the Weeds and the Prodigal Gardens posts on acorns provide extremely helpful step by step instructions on leaching acorns and making acorn flour. My own process represents a blend of these two.

First, I collected acorns in a bag. I avoided any with holes or cracks. After getting a bagful, I poured the acorns into a large bowl of water, discarding the acorns that floated to the top.

I then needed to dry the other acorns, which I did by putting them in the oven for about 20 minutes at 150 degrees.

After dehydrating the acorns, it was time to crack the shells. This was probably the most tedious part of the process, and it will destroy your fingernails. I literally cracked them open with a hammer, one by one, and then pried them apart with a knife.

Now the longest part of the process: leaching the acorns. Acorns have a very bitter taste because they are high in tannins. Leaching the acorn removes the bitter tannins, leaving a sweeter, nuttier taste in the meat. The blogs mentioned above indicate several methods for leaching, but mainly cold leaching and hot leaching. I chose the hot leaching method, which involves pouring the acorns into boiling water, boiling for 5-8 minutes, and then pouring out that water and pouring the acorns into another pot of boiling water. (Incidentally, the tannic water has excellent healing properties, so you may want to save it or even make it into ice cubes for medicinal purposes, like treating a rash or poison ivy.)

I was rather impatient with the boiling process, which Green Deane says can take many hours, but the Prodigal Gardens blog suggests only takes 5-6 water changes. I could still taste a little of the tannins, but the acorns were edible after I had done 5 water changes. Next time I will probably do many more, or try the cold method.

After leaching the acorns, I dehydrated them. There are plenty of ways to dehydrate food, including leaving it in the sun or cooking it at a low temperature in the oven, but I have a food dehydrator, so I used that.

Next step was to grind the acorns into a flour, first removing the papery sheaths. To grind the acorns, you can use a flour mill, a mortar and pestle (if you want to really do it the old-fashioned way), or a food processor (Vitamixes are great for making flours).

I used the following recipe to make my acorn bread:

1) Preheat oven to 400 degrees and grease a loaf pan.

2) Mix the following dry ingredients: 1 cup acorn flour, 1 cup wheat flour (oat or white flour is fine too), 2 tbsp baking powder, 1/2 tsp salt, and 1/4 cup raw sugar.

3) Add the following wet ingredients: 1 egg (slightly beaten), 1 cup milk, 1 tbsp honey, 3 tbsp oil.

4) Mix the ingredients and pour into loaf pan, then bake for 25 minutes (or until a knife or chopstick inserted into the loaf comes out clean).

5) (Optional): After 10 minutes of baking, drizzle honey over the top of the loaf.

The results were delicious! I added a pat of butter and ate a slice fresh from the oven. 

Figs are beginning to ripen

In New Orleans fig trees grow everywhere... often in people's yards, on private property, but also on public street corners and other public spaces. Right now, many figs are still green, but some are beginning to turn purple or bright yellow––a sign that they are ripe for the picking.

You can recognize fig trees pretty easily by their large, green palmate leaves (and, of course, by the fruit itself).

As I noted in a previous blog post, you can dehydrate the leaves and make a delicious, healthful herbal tea from them. You can also eat the figs raw, right off the tree (though it's better to wash them first, just to be safe). The sweetest figs I've found growing in New Orleans ripen to a soft purple.

These have a sweet, light taste and a rich texture, almost like biting into a ripened peach.

My absolute favorite way to eat foraged figs, however, is to partially dehydrate them. I put them in my food dehydrator just long enough that they are warm and beginning to ooze some of their sweet liquid, and then I eat them. The short (about 1-2 hours) dehydration makes them taste sweeter.

If I buy figs, I tend to buy them dried––they taste sweeter and keep longer. I also cook with dried figs rather than raw ones. One of my favorite recipes is a slow-cooked pot roast with dried figs. You can find the recipe here (just substitute dried figs for the dried fruit). Very healthy and delicious.

Happy foraging!

Foraging for Yellow Wood Sorrel

My first encounter with yellow wood sorrel wasn't in the wild, but at Epiphany Farm-to-Fork restaurant in Tuscaloosa, where I'm certain the chef used some in a dish. Yellow wood sorrel is identifiable by its clover-like leaves and small yellow flowers. It visually complements a dish yet also has a delicious taste.

In the wild, you can usually find it throughout the U.S. and in other parts of the world in forest, woods, or other areas with lots of shade. I found a ton of it when hiking the trail around Lake Lurleen in Tuscaloosa. Many people describe the taste as lemon-like, but to me and my friend Joya it has more of a sour-apple, tangy taste. It's really delicious, and a good addition to salads or other dishes. It provides a bit of nice texture and that unexpected tanginess.

Yellow wood-sorrel also has health and medicinal benefits, many of which are outlined on Harrison Murray's blog "Bushcraft." It's high in Vitamin C, and it also has diuretic and cooling properties. Murray cautions that it should be eaten in moderation, though, because it's high in potassium oxalate and oxalic acid.

In small amounts, it should be safe, healthy, and delicious. The main challenge (as with dandelions) is simply getting it from the ground to your table before it starts to wilt!

Foraging for Ginkgo Nuts

Foraging for ginkgoes is a stinky business. You've seen ginkgo trees - they have those lovely green fan-shaped leaves. But you might not have seen their fruit, mainly because most landscapers choose to plant the male trees (which have no fruit and don't smell) as opposed to the female trees (which have the smelly fruits).

You will likely smell the fruiting ginkgoes before you see them. They grow all over the Quad at the University of Alabama, where my foraging venture this month has taken place. To forage for ginkgoes, you should first put on latex gloves. The nuts are encased in the pulpy fruits, which can give you an allergic reaction (a skin rash kind of like you would get from poison ivy). So practice safety! Look for the fallen ginkgo fruits on the ground around the tree, and disregard any fruits that have large holes or tears. They should be slightly wrinkly in texture.

Push the seed, or nut (technically a drupe) out of the pulp, and place it into a bag. Rather than leaving a mass of smelly, nut-less pulps on the ground, I tend to put the discarded pulps in a second bag - you can throw it out or, ideally, compost it.

Once you have collected enough nuts, wash off all of the remaining pulp (you can also discard the gloves at this point). Wash thoroughly.

You must roast the nuts - ginkgo nuts are not edible raw. Leda Meredith and Wildman Steve Brill recommend roasting at 300 degrees for 30 minutes, but I recommend longer, about 45 minutes. I should caution you that your entire home will smell like cheese.

When you finish roasting the nuts, they look a little like pistachios (but that's not how they taste). You will open them similar to the way you open pistachios, however - except that there's one extra step.

Once you've cracked open the shell, the nut will still have a thin peel - similar to a roasted peanut. It's edible, but I tend to take them off.

Ginkgo nuts have an interesting taste. My foraging companion and I decided they taste like something between an almond and swiss cheese. The texture is also between these two things - though closer to swiss cheese. They are extremely healthy. Ginkgoes are very low in fat and can lower cholesterol. They've been shown to promote higher brain function and help prevent memory loss. They're rich in antioxidants. However, health professionals warn that children should not eat more than 5 nuts a day, and 10 for adults (some say 8) to avoid "ginkgo poisoning" (an upset stomach in most cases), though I will say I ate about 15 and felt fine. I ate these 15 before reading about ginkgo poisoning, however, so that's my excuse.

Happy foraging!

We can eat dandelions, but do they taste good?

Not really.

That is, not by themselves, pulled fresh out of the ground.  The greens have a bitter taste that I personally like, but I imagine most people won't. If pulling dandelions up from the ground and eating them is your first taste of wild edible foraging, you will probably be disappointed.

Now that being said, once you add dandelion greens to a salad, they enrich and embolden the flavor.

Fresh dandelion greens on top of leftover corn, tomato and eggplant salad

I tried picking some dandelion greens, washing them, and adding them to my leftovers of a flavorful vegetable salad (prepared by dear friends Andrew and Yelani), and the mix of the bitter greens with the sweetness of the corn and tomatoes was a perfect pairing.

Harvesting dandelions has so many benefits. They're weeds, so you're not harming a species by yanking a few of them out of the ground. They're a forager's dream in that you can use multiple parts of the plant. And they're extremely healthy.

The younger leaves are less bitter and can be added raw to salads and sandwiches (wash them first!).

Unopened flower buds can be fried or boiled.

You can make wine out of the flower petals.

You can blanch the leaves for cooking (just add a little olive oil).

You can make tea from the leaves, roots, and flower petals (don't use the whole flower head).

You can make dandelion coffee out of the taproot of the plant.

For more on making tea and coffee from dandelions (and preserving any leftovers), the Forager's Harvest blog has a very helpful entry.

The health benefits: dandelions have lots of vitamin A, calcium, and potassium. They can help with weight loss, improving memory, and PMS (in tea form). Dandelion is also a diuretic. For more on the nutrition and health benefits of this miracle weed, check out the Edible Wild Food blog.

For now, I'm going to stick with eating the greens. Something to bear in mind: pick dandelion greens right before you're planning to use them, if you're eating them raw. They will begin to wilt in your hand within seconds after picking them, so it's not the kind of plant you want to pick early on your foraging walks.

Foraging and Delayed Gratification

One of the frustrating things about foraging: most foraged plants are seasonal. Granted, this means that you can find some edible plants at any time of the year to harvest, but it also means that the edible plants you want to eat may not be ready for a while.

I have seen several lush fig trees with small green figs blooming on street corners throughout uptown - but they are ripening slowly. Today I spotted some furry green pecans growing in the university area... these won't be ready until fall.

I've also seen canna growing all over the city (mostly in private yards, but in some public spaces too). The beautiful red canna flowers may be blooming now, but foragers typically harvest the young rhizomes (horizontal roots), not the flowers - and these shouldn't really be harvested until the fall.

Canna growing along the street in the Riverbend area

Finally, to my surprise, I saw a ginkgo tree - according to the USDA site, these don't even grow here! In the fall, when the fruits fall to the ground, you can remove the seeds from the squishy fruit (with gloves), wash them, bake them, shell them, and fry or boil the nuts. Very healthy and delicious.

But for now, I have to wait.

Ginkgo in the Black Pearl

The Eat the Weeds blog has some helpful information for harvesting and enjoying ginkgo, if you're so inclined.

New Orleans' volatile weather adds another challenge to a by-the-book forager: many things ripen before or after they're supposed to according to nature guides or other informational sources.

I've noticed that some trees are already sprouting bunches of large bananas, while some are just beginning to flower. Kumquats are supposed to ripen in colder weather, but I've seen them growing all over uptown.

My personal strategy is just to track the things I want. You can find maps online of different cities and the location of various edible plants - for example, this one from Atlanta shows where you can find different fruits on a map of the city, and it wisely cautions foragers not to trespass. As you locate accessible wild edible plants, you can track them in this manner - and you won't forget where you saw a plant you're hoping to harvest.

Happy foraging!