Acorns

Acorn Foraging: Now Available on Kindle!

aliciabayer . Posted on December 23, 2017January 4, 2018

My acorn book for Kindle is now live on Amazon! It contains nutritional information, the history of acorns as food around the world, step-by-step instructions to process acorns and over 90 recipes.

Here’s a peek at the intro…

“Get ready to fall in love with acorns.

The smell of roasted acorns is my all-time favorite fall scent. There is no taste or smell quite like it. Our entire family loves this seasonal staple that we’ve been foraging for about fifteen years.

Every August or early September, my husband, my kids and I start gathering bags of acorns. We collect them at church, at parks, at friends’ houses and anywhere else where we find a nice stash of them. We’ve even harvested them on vacation when we found some fabulous white oak acorns while visiting a historic area in Iowa.

Various members of our family help with all the steps of acorn processing. The little ones help play “sink or float” when we discard the nuts that float. My husband and older kids crack the shells and pare off any bad spots, then we leach out the bitter tannins with either hot or cold water leaching. We roast or dry our final product, and begin cooking all kinds of wonderful treats with our bounty.

At this point, our whole house smells of the amazing aroma of acorns. It’s a smell I can never quite get enough of, and I often pop open a mason jar of nuts in the weeks that follow just to inhale that intoxicating scent.

The flavor of acorns is so distinct and almost buttery. The nuts can be ground into acorn flour or enjoyed in all kinds of dishes.

We started out using our acorn flour to make acorn bread and muffins, which are absolutely delicious. Acorn flour is also fantastic to add to breading for fried foods, plus is makes a wonderful addition to pancakes, breads, cookies and more. Over the years, we expanded our acorn repertoire into acorn pancakes, waffles, mini donuts, pie crusts and other baked goods. We began using chopped acorns for dishes like pasta and dips, along with making flavored butters, extracts, coffee and other basics. Further experimentation led to acorn ice cream, acorn-rice patties and lots of other new favorites…”