How to make acorns edible

Hello everyone and welcome. When people talk about foraging for foods, they always think about dandelions, but once cold weather gets here, can't find any more dandelions. To me, one of the most overlooked foods is the acorn, simply because you have to process them to get rid of the tannins in them, and it's actually an easy process to get rid of those tannins. And once you get to that point of getting the tannins out of them, you can add a lot of different things to them, because acorns don't have a lot of protein to them, but they do have a lot of fat. So let's process some acorns now and see what we can come up with. Here are the acorns that I'm going to use to make acorn flour, and these are large acorns, and I believe that they're white oak, and the only way to tell if they're white oak or red oak is to open them up. These appear to be white oak, and the reason why I say that they appear to be white oak is because the white acorn has like a peanut husk inside the shell, whereas a red oak has a fuzzy shell on it. There's only one way to test how much tannins are in these acorns, and that's to clean out this brown outer husk and taste them. So I got the brown hull cleaned off of it, and now it's time to taste it. These don't appear to have a lot of tannins in them, so I believe one good leaching will make them more palatable. Now that I have a baseline for these, I'm going to go ahead and process about a cup of them. When you're processing your acorns, if you come across any that have any black spots or anything like that on, the whole acorn itself is not bad. You can easily cut around that one area. And the thing to remember about acorns is they don't contain a lot of protein, but they do contain a lot of carbohydrates and fat. And sometimes when you're lucky, the paper shell stays inside the hull. So if you come across acorns like this that are already sprouted, don't pick them up. Just kick some dirt over them and let them grow. Now that I've got about a cup of acorns de-hulled, it's time to grind them up. And to do that, I'm going to use a food processor. And by food processor, I mean an old universal. So there's one grinding on the old universal, and I think I'm going to go ahead and do another one. So there's our second grinding of the acorn meat, and now it's time to package them up for leaching. The leaching process means that you've got to run water over your acorn meat to get rid of all the tannins in it. And you can take and do this by putting it in hose or a muslin bag or something along that line. But I'm going to use a piece of a large game quartering bag, and I just cut it like a strip out of it. And you can get these for like 50 cents after hunting season at Walmart. And there we go. We're now ready for the leaching process. So I've got my acorn meat all bundled up, and I'm going to put it in cold water and let it sit overnight. Now, if you were out in the woods, a correct way to do this would be to put it in a stream with the tailings under a rock so that the water would flow over it and get rid of all the tannins in it. And as you can see, as I pull this out and give it a little bit of a squeeze, you can see the tannins already running out of it. So here's my ground leached and now dried acorns, and they don't have a bad taste to them by themselves. They have kind of an earthy taste. To my acorns, I'm going to add some pecans that I was able to forage. And from my winter get-home kit, I'm going to add some spiced apple oatmeal. Now I'm just going to cook it up on my rocket stove rather than build a campfire. So here's my acorns, pecans, and oatmeal. It's not too bad. And the thing to remember when cooking something like this over an open flame is not to just put it on there and let it sit. You have to take and let it get up to a boil and then take it off and let the water soak into everything. Because if you don't, it'll actually burn to the bottom of your cup. So there's how to make acorns edible. And acorns are really overlooked due to the fact that they do have tannins in them and you have to leach them out. But once you do, they're actually quite good and they have kind of a granola texture to them, unless you keep grinding them out, grinding them out, and then you can make acorn flour. So thank you for watching. We'll see y'all next time.