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.