Welcome to the very first post of the blog you’ve been asking me to write on wildcrafting and gardening and recipes for the food porn I randomly post. As things go, this plant blog has predictably turned into a sensorial love story of how the Land holds and heals us, interlaced with the knowledge and recipes and relationships I’ve cultivated along the way. As a dear sister who knows me well once reassured me, “Nothing is simply platonic for a Taurus.”
It’s almost impossible to stray far from that which we love the very most without a deep ache for what we once had, but can no longer touch or taste or behold. This has been true of relationships in my own life—with people, food, places. There’s a hunger that doesn’t subside when the heart is taken away from where—or whom—it belongs or is distanced from those with whom it most wants to entwine. And sometimes, it turns out, we just don’t realize what we’ve truly lost until we find our way back to it again.
It was this way for me and my relationship to the Land when I long ago wandered away from the awe & wonder of a free-range childhood in the 70’s and stumbled blearily into the parties & chaos of my teens and 20’s.
The umbilicus to what was real & nourishing & life-giving had been clamped and cut by the messaging, media & strange trips of my rebellious youth. The allure of Nature was no match for the seduction of night life, strobe lights and a throbbing base. Like a long-forgotten lover, my purest essence vanished in the chalky fog of dance clubs, and I squealed off into the dark… sitting bitch on the ride of my life.
Waking back up was >>> excruciating. In fact, to say that it was the most heavy and humbling experience of my life is putting it lightly. But, alas, we can not outrun who we really are for long without ending up splayed out flat on the narrowing path before us, breathless.
Motherhood broke me wide open. It awakened a ferocity I’d never known previously and ignited a holy wildfire I had no idea could rage within me. My life swiftly reconfigured and the once tolerable dynamics I’d allowed to exist without question no longer fit my shifting perception of sanity.
Crossroads are for choosing and the choice I faced was to continue dragging my lifeless relationship down the same pitted road riddled with mounting landmines or turn towards the welcoming, fertile ground that held the hope of a new plan or at least something that didn’t hurt as much as what I had thus far made of my life.
I wanted so much more than a partnership that teetered on the shaky foundation of substance use and deception. Three therapists later, the decision to extract myself from the thickening quicksand of my marriage and walk faithfully away from the dysfunction of our union became the next step in my own healing.
With my 10-month old baby strapped to my chest and my 6-year old son at my side, I landed barely upright on a farm in the hills of Julian. Our new home was an 18′ teepee under a canopy of strapping, noble oaks lining a rocky creekbed. The quiet welcomed me. The trees sheltered me. I searched for what was left of me.
My son soon made friends with our hosts’ three sons—two mischevious twins and their older brother, who perilously tried to keep them under control. The boys took my son in like a fourth sibling and I saw little of him once the young pack disappeared into the sea of wild oats surrounding us.
I sat for days under the hovering oaks, nursing my daughter, gazing out onto the rolling grasslands, trying to make sense of my circumstance. There’s this thing that happens in the stillness of brokenness that opens space for what is organic and real to arise. The longer I sat and stared, the more aware I became of the rhythms and cycles around me: the daily ritual of Steller’s jays scratching and pecking around for acorns and other nuts; midnight visits from a coyote pup upon our outdoor table top, scavenging the food we had dropped; the blossoming moon rolling time forward, in spite of my own immobility.
Recently, my father brought me a heavy box loaded with black acorns he’d collected on the grounds of the intentional community where he’s living right now, which happens to be in the same mountain town where I sought refuge almost sixteen years before. The box was weighted with hundreds of acorns, but also laiden with the unrealized dream from my days on the farm of making acorn flour a regular staple for my own growing family.
And this is the way of life and relating, I have found… a series of experiences, lessons and opportunities that reliably spiral back around in their own impeccable timing.
For the last few days, I’ve been reconnecting with the black acorns that once littered the ground around us, remembering what my friends on the farm taught me about collecting and drying and preparing them for processing. I’ve been thinking back on the long hikes into the hidden groves and the cash of nuts we’d haul back in buckets to the wooden deck outside our teepee. I’ve been feeling just how resourced we are in so many different ways when the wild is well within reach.
In fact, it’s not a surprise at all that within a week of receiving this box of black acorns, I ran into my friends from the farm in the coastal town where we all now live, but rarely cross paths. Life does have a way of weaving us together when we align with what is most meaningful.
Directions for Making Acorn Four
Gather Your Acorns
You’ll want to collect acorns from oak trees that produce a large nut, if possible. Here, in San Diego, we go for the Black Oak or Valley Oak acorns. You’ll have to do some research in your region, but if you can’t find a larger variety, you can always try what you’ve got available, it’ll just be more tedious and labor intensive, the smaller the nut.
Separate Good Nuts from Rotten Nuts
Once you’ve gathered a good amount of acorns off the ground, you’ll want to separate the good ones from those that already have holes, rot and larvae inside. I do this by filling up a big cooler (I happened to have a styrofoam cooler my dad had left when I did this batch and it worked perfectly). You can also use a large sink.
Fill the container with water and slowly add several hands full of acorns, leaving enough space to manually push the acorns down to the bottom and let them pop back up. The damaged acorns along with twigs and leaves will generally float to the top, and the good acorns will mostly sink to the bottom.
From here, scoop out the top layer, periodically checking to see that they are, in fact, mostly the damaged nuts. Notice the upper styrofoam container and the box on the left in the photo. Both have acorns with holes in them, as well as the fact that the acorns are a much lighter color than the good acorns in the green ceramic dish on the right. Once you remove the top layer, reach down into the bottom of your container and pull out those that have sunk. Set them aside for the next step. Out of the hundreds of acorns my dad brought me this time, I’d say 1/4 of them were good. The sooner you pick them up of the ground, I assume, the more viable acorns you’ll have.
Dry the Acorns
Next, you can either spread the acorns out on a flat surface and let them dry out on their own or put them in a dehydrator and dry them more quickly. Now, I winged it at about 125 degrees for a day or two in the dehydrator and it seemed to work. I could tell that they were fully dried when I could take a hammer to the acorn and hear a solid crack upon hitting it. Otherwise, when they aren’t yet dry, the outside of the acorn is still a little rubbery.
Shell Them
Next, set aside a good amount of time to shell them. This is tedious, no matter the size of the acorn, which is why the bigger varieties are definitely better in this particular circumstance. Last night, a friend I hadn’t seen in ages called and wanted to come by, so I took out my box of dried acorns and a hammer (a nut cracker would do just fine, but there’s something really satisfying about cracking the acorns with a hammer), and sat there shelling them while we caught up on the insanity of the last two years.
If you’re shelling them in phases, put the raw, dried nut meat in a mason jar or ziplock until you have enough to grind. I filled a quart-sized baggy before moving to the next step. I’ve heard you can keep the rest of the whole, dried acorns in a bucket until they’re ready to be shelled and used, so no need to shell all of them before you need them.
Grind Them
Next, take your raw, dried nut meat and either grind it in small batches in the coffee grinder or use a food processor to grind them. You can also throw them into a Vitamix, which is what I did. However, when I do this again, I won’t grind them so finely, because some of that powder dissolved into the water in the next step. I suggest leaving your ground acorns a little more course until after you leach them.
Leach Them
Now we leach the tannins out of the ground nut meat by soaking it in water, changing out the water regularly. There are a couple of different ways to do this.
The first is to put the ground acorn meat in a stocking or cloth bag and place it in the toilet tank (Note tank, not bowl) for several days. Each flush runs cool water through the acorn meal, leaching it of tannins. Again, make sure the meal isn’t ground so small that you lose it through the bag. If you’re not squirming over this option and you’re up for the adventure, empty the tank first and give it a scrub, then fill it back up for leaching.
If the toilet tank method gives you the jeebies, you can fill a mason jar 1/2 way with the ground nut meat and then top it off with water. Close the lid (a flip lid works well for this, but I didn’t have one handy) and place in the fridge for 24 hours. Take it out after 24 hours, pour off the water and refill. No need to strain it, simply pouring off the excess floating over the acorn meal works fine. Replace in the fridge. Do this for several days until the bitterness is gone.
I actually strained mine several times each day, because…why not? I’ve also heard of people leaching for a couple of weeks, which sounds excessive to me, maybe I’m missing something. By day three, it had become palatable and I began to get excited over the thought of coming up with a sunflower/acorn manna bread recipe for our upcoming Thanksgiving dinner with family. I’m not a huge Turkey Day fan (could, generally, take it or leave it), but I do love family and it’s been a long time since we’ve seen several of our kin, so I’m looking forward to sharing space and some wildcrafted flavors.
Hot vs Cold Leaching
There IS a difference!
Leaching the meal in hot water will cook the starches and reportedly makes them suitable for soups and other recipes where you don’t want the meal to stick together. Cold leaching leaves the starch in tact and gives it a better consistency for baking. But this isn’t entirely the case, because I just threw some cold leached flour into my soup and it did just fine. So, go figure.
Drain and Dehydrate
When you taste test the acorn meal for bitterness, be sure to dig down below the surface for a sample. Otherwise, you’ll be grabbing from the top layer where you’ve been pouring off the tannins. After day 3-4 of leaching, the meal should be palatable enough that you don’t make a face when you taste it. It doesn’t taste outrageously delicious in it’s raw state, so keep your expectations low. Though it smells incredible, like hazelnut coffee (says someone who doesn’t even drink coffee and thinks roasted chicory makes a delicious replacement). So, take that for whatever it’s worth.
From here, you can either spread the meal out on your dehydrator lined with wax paper or pour it onto a lined cookie sheet and put it in the oven on low to dehydrate. But, before you do that, it helps to pour the acorn meal into a muslin bag and hang it up to drain for a bit, so you’re not dealing with a bunch of slop.
This is where I suck a little, because I can’t say exactly how long to dry it, but keep the heat low and keep checking. After a couple of hours when the meal has dried up a little, go back in and break up the clumps, so they dry more consistently (not a necessary step, but helpful).
I let mine dry in the dehydrator on a low heat overnight, because I planned on storing the flour and wanted to make sure there wasn’t any moisture left when I put it in an airtight jar, but if you’re putting it right into a recipe, I wouldn’t worry too much about it.
Here’s the final product, which I turned into sunflower/manna bread and a fermented, pecan/acorn “cheese” ball that was more like a pate and thoroughly enjoyed by my family.
