Holm oak acorns (Quercus ilex) and a crack at the forager’s carb conundrum

Holm oak (Quercus ilex) acorns

It has been called the ‘forager’s dilemma’, the problem of procuring, even in a world seemingly bursting with wild food, the energy-rich foundation of a carbohydrate source that almost all human diets rely on. In most traditional foraging economies, most Australian Aboriginal ones included, this quest for the daily bread was the biggest labour demand in the community, reliant on often labour-intensive gathering and processing of plant seeds and roots. It was the process of finding ways to influence the abundance and distribution of these plants that gave rise, not through any ‘agricultural revolution’ but by a gradual human-plant coevolution, to farming and the type of cultures from which most of us descend. Among those plants that could be farmed, a relatively small suite now provide the vast majority of human food energy. Among those not so easily farmed, many once-treasured species have become largely forgotten. Like oaks, and their acorns.

Harvested acorns

Across much of the northern hemisphere, acorns, the fruit of oak trees (Quercus spp.), are believed by many to have been so fundamental to the human diet that people speak of ‘balanocultures’ (see here), being those of people for whom the oak forest and its products was the home, the hearth and the daily bread. In a few places, remnants of balanoculture survive. In a few parts of Italy, acorn cakes remain (notably using holm oaks), some Native Americans still treasure their balanophagy (acorn-eating) as a tradition (see here and here), and it is alive and well in Korea. In Spain, while acorn eating by people is largely gone, a landscape called dehesa is still treasured in places; being open oak woodlands with holm oak (Quercus ilex) and cork oak (Q. suber) as the dominant trees over meadows grazed by cattle. The trees directly provide firewood and cork and the acorn crops are hoovered up by pigs, whose consumption of them gives their meat a special quality, revered and central to the finest Iberian hams (jamon). Dehesa was traditionally often communal land, both a grazing commons and a public oak woodland in which wild greens and fungi were also foraged and small game hunted. I like the idea of dehesa.

Holm oak (Quercus ilex) tree

My nearest big park has more than 300 holm oaks (Quercus ilex), a peculiarly large number for a tree not otherwise at all commonly planted around here. It is about as close to dehesa as probably exists in Australia. Picnickers, joggers, cricketers and dogwalkers replace the grazing animals – but there is nothing really there to treasure the acorns. A few rats may be doing ok out of them, and then for a first time, last autumn, there was me. From a fairly random collection of ideas from books and the net I came up with a fairly random experimental approach (mainly from here and pages on the same blog, here and here and (surprisingly from a fellow-Australian) here). The big challenge, and probably the big obstacle to modern balanoculture catching on, is that acorns almost invariably come with tannin levels that make them inedible without some long and quite complex processing – more than enough to make most people quit and head down to the shops for some flour and/or almond meal.

But should you decide to give acorns a go yourself, and it will probably need to be more for the adventure of it than any realistic need to solve your own ‘forager’s dilemma’, you will get most of the way to learning how from the weblinks above. But truth be told they will also include some advice that doesn’t work, or at least won’t work when you try it. I don’t know if it is differences in oak species, preferences, or simply that these are all partly experimental rediscoveries of balanoculture rather than the refined detail of an established culinary tradition, but no advice that I have found to date is fool-proof or complete. Anything offering a shortcut is the most likely to be wrong. I have altogether removed from this post almost any and all advice that I had previously written, thinking perhaps that by next autumn’s harvest I might have something more than another journeyman’s reckonings to offer. Still, the photos below give some indication of the direction I ended up with.

With as many as a half of all the acorns gathered spoiled in one way or another after 4 months storage: 1) I won’t store them that long again; and 2) Those that were picked straight from the tree rather than gathered off the ground had a better success rate.

I started out with acorns from different trees separated and regret not keeping it that way, having repeatedly read that part of the challenge is to find those rare trees with the sweetest acorns needing the least leaching

Although I think I lost a few too many by trying to store the acorns too long, they can become easier to shell with a bit of drying.

I have read of hammers, knives and nutcrackers all being put to the task of shelling acorns, but found that for mine, a mortar and pestle with the mortar overturned worked very well.

After a few months, the acorn meat becomes oxidised, brown, often peppered with mould and occasionally crumbled by grubs (probably a weevil), but I pressed on with all but the worst looking.

Some may shy at the idea, but leaching acorns in a bag soaking in a toilet cistern is pure simple genius – after all, you want clean, cool water changed a few times daily including first and last thing of the day.

It will undoubtedly vary from tree to tree, let alone species to species, but it took 6 days for the water to run clear when leaching my holm oak acorns

Once leached, drying the acorn meat (both oven and dehydrator worked for me) allows the papery, bitter skin to be removed. I then gave them another soak overnight to soften them before grinding in a food processor into a gritty flour.

I tried roasting a few acorns for a few hours to get them very hard and dark, aiming at an acorn coffee – I had limited success but have confidence that it can be done.

While the acorn coffee was not superb, mixing acorn meal in equal parts with self-raising flour plus honey, butter and egg yolk, the egg whites then beaten and folded in, made a lovely, nutty acorn honeycake.

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