How to Sustainably Forage and Cook Acorns (Acorn Flour Pancakes)
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- Опубликовано: 20 сен 2024
- Here's our complete guide on how to identify acorns, where and when to find acorns, how to collect them sustainably, and how to process and cook them!
This is a segment from our online foraging course (The Complete Guide to Foraging your Food). More info on the full course here: homegrownhandg...
00:00: Intro
01:48 How to Identify Acorns
03:23 Where to Find Acorns
04:03 When to Find Acorns
05:02 Oak Tree Ecology
07:07 Processing and Preserving Acorns
08:47 Acorn Flour Pancakes!
Having never watched this guy's videos, I kind of fear and hate RUclips for knowing, based exclusively on my viewing preference, this is absolutely the sort of thing I would enjoy watching
(Good video!)
Haha yea that algo catches me off guard sometimes too
I absolutely love the symbolism of the small acorn growing into a massive oak!
Same! It's incredible that such huge beings come from tiny little acorns.
You should see giant sequoia seeds. Largest tree on the planet comes from a seed the size of a splinter, with rounded wings on each side, making it look like a golden brown flake of oatmeal.
If you don’t have the Sioux Chef cookbook yet, you’re missing out on a seriously good resource.
Yea we like Sean’s recipes a lot!
My oldest red oak tree is definitely having a heavy mast year; been about 3 years since the last mast. Excited to share with my wildlife neighbors and to try acorn pancakes this fall! 🥞✨
Nice! Yea the red oaks around us are also starting to drop a lot of acorns this week
Beautiful video to wake up to in Australia - perfect way to start the last day of winter here. Thank you 🙂
I can watch these videos over and over again.
I love the way you live off the land, you’re such an inspiration.
I just happen to have an oak tree in my front yard. I’m very excited to start foraging acorns.
Thank you so much for sharing this! I live in Providence, RI where we are definitely having a masting year- piles and piles of acorns on all the sidewalks of our neighborhood! Was curious about their uses and now feel empowered to experiment with them.
NEEDED! Love this. I have two mature Oak trees on my property and hope for a bumper crop this season, so to harvest and use them as per your examples. THANK YOU BOTH!
This was the PERFECT video on foraging! I loved the organization of the information- so thorough, yet still succinct and interesting start to finish! Acorns are something I’ve known was possible to forage, but always seemed fussy because of the tannins.
Now it seems low-effort and do-able!
I live in Christchurch, NZ, where we have a massive park (407 acres) filled with many varieties of enormous oak trees but there are no squirrels in NZ to eat them. The main hospital is located in the park, and I walked through these oak trees nearly daily for 4.5 months this year to visit my husband in hospital. Fortunately he is better now but it was a rough time. Standing in the middle of those oak trees and watching the acorns ripen and fall over the months was very healing for me. Although I thought of you guys and felt bad all those acorns were wasted calories!
Wow, yea that sounds like a great opportunity for some foragers. Glad your husband is doing better now!
I foraged several pounds of chestnuts one year. So good ❤
Thank you, I've always been intimidated by leeching but I've always wanted to try acorn. I will give your method a try!
Oaks don’t seem to have been very heavily planted here in Montreal, but I’ve seen more since the mass ash death. Though they’re rare here, I’ve found a bur oak cluster in a nearby forest that I will try to check on. Otherwise, I’m hoping that shagbark nuts won’t be as much of a bust as last year!
Haven't seen them much in Montréal either. Not many forgeable trees are planted here unfortunately. The only couple of fruits I can think of are crabapples and chokecherries. Been really trying to find an American plum or sour cherry with no success
@@Alex-qn4hb I’ve found a few plums. I think black plum though and they’re mostly bare.
But near me I would say the most available foraging option in street trees seems to be Hackberry. I haven’t gotten to harvesting them yet though. Kentucky coffee tree is getting quite abundant as well. I have a few pods to process right now.
This is the most helpful resource I’ve found so far! I had a hard time thinking of what I could make with acorn flour as bread/muffins doesn’t really appeal to me but pancakes are perfect!!! Cant wait to try this out.
You are sooo interesting. This is exactly the information I was looking for.
Thank you
Thank you for talking about how important oaks are for the wildlife. I've heard they're also in serious decline in a lot of areas, probably as a result of a lack of controlled burns and competition for sunlight. Even if people don't have the time to process acorns for food, I'd still encourage them to pick up a few and try growing them at home, just to make sure there's another generation of oak trees once the mature ones age and die out.
I have never harvested acorns but have quite a few growing on the farm. Since we also have wild hogs I’ve always noticed some years there are fewer hogs and realized why when you were talking about how the acorns are shed. Now I’m even more curious how you learned that? I’m an avid reader and I can’t believe I’ve missed that info along the way. Thank you for sharing what you’ve learned!
We learned a lot from our parents, but we also both studied biology in college (which is where we met 🙂) and took a lot of ecology and botany classes. If you’re specifically interested in learning more about Oak trees, I’d recommend reading The Nature of Oaks by Doug Tallamy
Guns, Germs, and Steel as well as Braiding Sweetgrass talk about mast years@@HomegrownHandgathered
@@HomegrownHandgathered
I wondered if it was forestry in college so what you took makes more sense. You both are perfect examples of Earth Babies from the 60-70’s, not hippies but the ones who wanted a more natural lifestyle and started learning gardening, bread making and the sorts they hadn’t learning growing up. I will get the book, thank you.
@@melodysfiresidefarm kind of, but my parents actually did learn this stuff growing up. Our family didn’t really ever stop farming and foraging like a lot of families did during the industrial revolution. My grandparents had factory jobs, but also farmed, gardened, hunted and foraged on the side.
I always imagined that leeching would be a super technical process. This seems very doable.
Nope! When the water no longer tastes bitter, it’s good to go. Simple as that 🙂
Oh snap, acorn pancakes! We have a lot of red oak acorns, so I’m excited to forage this fall! Mother nature is just amazing. Thank you for highlighting God’s handiwork in this video!
How do you know when to stop changing out water if using hot water? Can you also explain how you pour out the cold water on the ground acorn flour & how you dry it to turn to flour?
Pancakes looked amazing, and I can’t wait to make some this fall!
You know when to stop changing the water by tasting the water or some of the ground acorns every once in a while and when they’re no longer bitter, they’re good to go. And we just dry them by straining them out of the water and spreading them on parchment paper to put in our dehydrator or oven on its lowest setting
I like to mix acorn flour and chickpea flour for pancakes. Usually with some sort of dried berry or elderflower powder to lighten up the flavor a bit
Very cool, we have all of those things so maybe we’ll give that a try! Thanks
Thank you!
I really enjoyed the ecological primer on oak trees!
Glad to hear it! If you liked that, you’ll love the book “The Nature of Oaks” by Doug Tallamy
thank you so much
I know that with the Natives, it took 500 lbs. of acorns to feed a family of four for the year - so 120 lbs. per person. I wonder how much space of oak forest it would take to give 120 lbs. of acorns.
A single mature tree can actually drop up to 1,000 lbs of acorns in a good masting year.
And there are a lot of indigenous folks who still forage acorns for food. I know you weren’t doing it intentionally, but talking about people in the past tense can sometimes make it seem like they don’t exist anymore.
Great video. Love the cold leaching. If I find some acorns, I will try this. Amazing that one often reads that acorns are inedible. Period. No explanation that they can be edible. I watched one video about a year ago in which someone put their acorns whole in a mesh bag and tied on a rope to a stone in a strong current in a stream, in order to leach them. I found that method left me wondering how the water could get to the tannins at the heart of the acorn and leach them out. Have you ever heard of that method? I like your method of grinding and leaching over several days in cold water.
Could you possibly roast acorns after you've leeched them, then eat them? Just wondering they could also be a snack on their own
Yup! We crumble them up after hot leaching sometimes and roast them with a little oil and fruit to make granola. Just don’t roast them too long or they turn into little rocks 😅
Here in Southern California we have a very different type of oak tree. Wonder if they can be processed the same as the acorns you’ve got.
May I ask, how do you dry the slurry after the leaching?
We spread it out on parchment paper and put it on the trays in our dehydrator or an oven on its lowest setting
@@HomegrownHandgathered thanks!
I have a Water Oak, should I worry about the black mold? It makes beautiful orange fleshed acorns on good years. This year looks bad which always means a rough winter.
when curing, do they need to be spread out into a single layer or can they stay in whatever container they’re in?
The local Government offices (ireland) have oak trees around the carpark, I've been collecting the oak gall nuts to tan fish skin into leather or make ink. Now I'm curious to see if its red or white oak!
Is there a risk of it fermenting while you do the longer cold water leaching? If so, how do you prevent it?
You should change out the water pretty often, sometimes several times a day
Wonderful video! Have always wanted to try harvesting acorns! Got a few last year but so many ended up Wevil infested, so was only left with three to eat, and got impatient trying to untannine them with hot water so ended up eating them to early 😅
Curious though, alot of the oak trees around me drop their acorns while still green, are these fine to use? Can I harvest them and keep them until they ripen? Will they do this like tomatos do?
Yea, it kind of varies from tree to tree around here and we collect the green ones as long as they’re full sized and the cap comes off easily. If the cap holds on tight, they’re probably underripe
You mentioned making a porridge out of the grainy bits, I make a porridge out of masarepa, would thos be a good substitute for that?
Possibly, but I don’t know if it would have quite the same texture since masa has a lot more of that gelatinous starch
Would've been nice to see you shell the acorns
They show that in other videos. Good reason to look back through their playlist.
Never been this early! 🎉
You can harvest acorns this early?
That footage is from last year, but they’re already starting to drop around here, yea
What about live oaks? That's all I see in Florida.
I wish we had oak trees here in AK. Too cold though, only burr oaks can survive the harsh winters. Actually there aren't many tree crops here and so folks have adapted to a much higher meat diet, which was sustainable until the US government allowed trawler and mining corporations to completely devastate our local ecosystems. Our fisheries are in full collapse now, there's almost no fish or crustaceans left here and many families are starving as a result. It's awful.
Here in the Northern states, we have red and white oaks. We get very cold winters. You should have those as well.
An I actually first?
Not a habit of being killed 😂😂😂 poor things