Processing acorns always takes time, and the days I spend making food out of these nuts from black oak trees is more than I first bargained for. In Yosemite last October, I knelt and crouched under canopies and picked them up from the ground. One or maybe two at a time, I selected from the fat and hard shells to find those biggest and with no holes. I picked them up in the parking lot by the hotel, around back where I thought maybe nobody would bother me. I picked them up by Amber’s truck and in the gradual uphill climb from our campsite, where trees made everything outside the trail go quiet. I picked them up from the ground underneath where Brian was climbing, and I kept picking them up. While everyone was looking up, I looked down. I ended up with about ten pounds of acorns from that valley floor, and I carried them home in a sleeping bag stuff sack in the back of my truck.
Oaks grow here where I live on the coast1— lots of kinds. I mostly recognize coast live and canyon live, and tan oak which harbors the public secret that it is not a true oak. We even have black oak on the eastern side of these coastal mountains and in the big valley over there. But these acorns I am processing now came from far away, from beyond the valley in that well-loved place called the Sierra Nevada. This feels like a necessary detail considering my propensity for eating local. Does it help my case that these acorns traveled here snug with me in my truck, that they peeked at McKenzie’s smiling face before going home? That maybe they heard Nanci Griffith playing through my stereo while we rode together? I think so.
Informational graphic courtesy of Kelly
These acorns sat on a tarp in my room for about a week drying and then in my closet for the winter. On the walk home from work in February and March, I looked at the ephemeral flowing creek down from the bald mountain and reminded myself that I have acorns to process. It felt good to have that task on the to-do list through the winter, like security. Event though I live in a land of abundance when it comes to food2, the acorns in the closet were a comfort. I feel that these little nuts are a sacred, wild gift and when I passed the seasonal stream every day, I was reminded of that. Running water, or some pot of water that can be changed, is required for acorn processing. The earth gave the people creeks and rivers for acorn processing, and that moment of remembering beside the creek was always important, even if I did wait until the dry season to get started.
A moment now to note lack of mentorship. The other day, my friend Asher was over and he remarked, regarding my bubbling mead and softening sauerkraut and bay nut chocolate, that he was impressed that I taught myself all this stuff using books and the internet. And I said back to him, that’s all there is. Of course there are people who know how to craft with wild foods, and who I could pay to teach me things, but the ultimate lesson in these projects is learned by doing, and most of the time I don’t have anyone more knowledgable than myself to do them with. This is not at all a comment on how grandiose and knowledgable I am! I don’t know very much and neither do my friends. We’re figuring it out together though, using books and the internet, because that’s all we’ve got.
My most learn-ed of mentors, Marcel the Acorn Mangler
When summer finally came around, and the longest day presented itself and went away again, I got started on the acorn process. I filled a few sheet pans with acorns in their shells and left them on a picnic table outside for two days. I covered the whole area with hardware cloth, to keep the very interested jays away. When the acorns were nice and solarized3 I brought them to the concrete slab outside the back door or under the apple tree, and whacked each one point-side-down to break the shells off. I could only do one at a time, and it went slowly. Sometimes my cat sat next to me. Sometimes I talked on the phone. It was meditative and quiet, and in the afternoon the swallows and the wind were the only noises that perturbed my whacking. Another moment to feel gratitude for living where there is abundant light and air.
Next, the shell-less nuts spend a few days inside the oven with just the pilot light on. Maybe two days? They all have a red, bitter, papery skin that is pretty tough to get off without some serious drying. I feel motivated by the words of Julia Parker4 who is quoted here as saying you must get every little piece of skin off or you’ve done a lazy job.5 When I take them out of the oven, the nuts have dried enough that the papery skin comes off easier. Not too easy, because this is still slow food, but it’s certainly an improvement.
At work we have a hand-powered corn mill. But I am at home, not at work, and I could walk down to grab it but instead I use a food processor and whir the skinless acorns into a coarse meal. This meal goes into a bowl of water, or a mesh bag in some kind of carafe to leach. Leaching takes maybe a week? Two weeks? It depends on the variety of acorn. Every day I change out the water until the coarse, wet meal has lost its bitter flavor and astringent mouthfeel. This part I love, and it’s what I love about many wild food and adventurous kitchen projects. Here, like in the world of the past, the barometer of success is my body. How does my sense of taste react to the soaking acorns? My tongue gets to decide what is correct. No educational institution on the matter of acorns also means no grades, no test. Is it tasty? Then it’s done! And that folks, is how we restore power to the people.
Political interlude: Despite the amount of steps I’ve listed so far in my acorn process, this food plant is among the easiest and simplest ways for humans of my bioregion to get our sustenance. Yes, even easier than microwave popcorn. Nobody built a tractor so I could harvest the acorns. No earth was tilled, no trees were cut down. Nobody was underpaid to plant in the frigid morning air, to harvest under the hot sun. Nobody was paid at all! The economy did not grow. No plastic package was manufactured overseas and used to seal the acorns off from the outside world in some sort of hygienic baggie. No, I picked them up off the ground near a granite boulder and took them home. I cracked them open with a hammer but I could have used a rock, a food processor could be a mortar, the pilot light in the oven could have been the dry sun. Acorns have been a staple food in California since time immemorial. If we are willing to engage with our food, to get to know these neighbor nuts, then we have already found one of the many answers of the broken food system question.
Furthermore, I’m not interested in learning to leach acorns and make flour because I believe that the economy will crash or the world will end and I want to be prepared.6 That’s an interesting benefit, but no. My delight in these fat, hard creatures comes from that other way of knowing I mentioned: my body. Packaged food is not interesting or beautiful to my body. At times it is useful, but it’s disconnected and wasteful and I suspect a temporary weirdness of our times. Acorns sitting on the picnic table outside existing patiently on their journey to become my food is beautiful. The quiet around the crack of the hammer while shells come off is beautiful to me, as a way to spend part of this day in my human body. In our modern world, we have all been encouraged to specialize in something and do that one thing for our livelihood and then pay for everything else, but I feel in my heart that it sucks to live that way. The sacred magic of slowly activating and then eating a gift from a tree in the woods ties us into reciprocity7 like nothing else. And reciprocity is interdependence, is truth.
When the acorn meal tastes a little sweet and mostly bland, I strain out the last water and spread it all out on a sheet pan to dry under the pilot light again. This could happen in the sun, but the oven provides more protection against rodents. This takes about a day. I then pass the meal once more through the food processor or the hand mill if I’ve made it down to work to fetch it by then. The resulting flour can be stored on the shelf. Some people say it has to go in the fridge, but I have fine results just leaving it in a cabinet.
Wild, special foods like this taste best when shared, so be sure to invite your friends or your crush over to make acorn pancakes, or acorn sourdough, or if your flour came out a little funky then maybe just acorn mush. Your friends or your crush will have a lot of questions, and if you feel excited about this process then the conversation will be vibrant and real and beautiful. And you will feel the dark brown, nutty way that the oak tree wanted you to feel when she gave you her seeds.
Do you recognize any plants that grow where you live? Better yet, any that you can eat? Do you think of them as weeds? What tastes have our palates adapted to because of convenience? Could we adapt them to something else?
This video is a way better step-by-step on how to process acorns and I learned a lot from it. For further reading, check out the footnotes as well as this related essay that I loved a lot.
In places where I spent lots of time, like Green Oaks Creek farm or Año Nuevo or in this case Santa Cruz.
Too much abundance. Let’s talk later about food waste, gleaning, and the sacred art of dumpster diving.
Actually I think this part of the process helps with cracking them open. It makes the shells more brittle I believe? It seemed to help and improve my later cracking.
Julia is a Kashia Pomo and Coast Miwok elder who is well-known for her incredible California Native basketry.
Does laziness exist? I wanted good-tasting acorn flour!
People who find great joy in doing things for this reason are sometimes known as “preppers” and I feel strongly that I do not include myself among them.
Braiding Sweetgrass Braiding Sweetgrass Braiding Sweetgrass