323/365 I must be F*$%ing nuts

323/365 I must be F*$%ing nuts
Originally uploaded by tallasiandude.

So, I was encouraged to try and make acorn flour by someone who stumbled on some of the pictures in my Flickr stream. I was sucked in by her enthusiasm, the apparent ease of the process and the success of her result (pancakes!), but I'm beginning to regret that decision.

I had actually considered it a few weeks back when it first became clear that we were getting overwhelmed with acorns and it seemed like a waste to simply throw them all away. I poked around the interwebs and found a few descriptions of acorn bread made from acorn flour, but it seemed like a lot of work to leech the tannins out of the meat and then realizing that we were dealing with tannin-rich black oak acorns pretty much killed it at the time.

My mind was changed when the correspondence effused about the tastiness of black oak acorn meal, but after investing several hours of selecting, hammering, shelling, sorting, skinning and sorting again and then ending up with maybe a cup of acorn meat is making me reconsider. I may go through one more container of sorted acorns just to have enough to bake or cook something, but I think this is going to be a "learning experience" kind of project. (i.e. I've learned that I never want to do this again, unless maybe if I'm trying to torture some hypothetical future children with their own "learning experience" or something.)

If I had to do this back before colonization/industrialization to feed myself, I'm pretty sure I would have already starved to death by now.