The possibilities are almost endless! Add acorn masa to mush, stew, or soups. (If the meal is left exposed to the air, it will oxidize to a dark brown color. Borrowing their terminology, I call our product "acorn masa".įor long-term storage (Le " a week or more), acorn masa can be frozen. The finished acorn pulp will have about the consistency of the wetground cornmeal that Mexicans call masa. All that's left now is to press the excess liquid out of the dishtowel wrapped acorn solids, then place the doughy meal in a storage container. When leaching is complete, the finished product willīe rather blandtasting. If the grinds are still bitter, rinse them a minute more. Continue to stir the meal in this fashion for about five minutes-or until the "creamy" look is gone and the water runs clear-then taste it. Which means that to get rid of the bitterness, all you usually have to do is pour your acorn pulp into a dish-towel-lined colander, place the colander under slow running water, and gently work the pulp around with your hand, allowing the liquid to wash the acorn meal. Our next job is to remove these bitter substances, via a process known as leaching.įortunately, the substances that make most (but not quite all) acorns bitter are water-soluble. When you're done, you'll have a thick, cream-colored goo that looks utterly delicious but is-infact unpleasantly bitter due to the high concentration of tannins in the slurry. buy the final result is the same.) All you have to do with a blender is dump in a cup of shelled acorns fill the blender's container on up with water (the exact amount o: liquid is unimportant), and whiz away at high speed for a minute or two. (If you don't have a blender-or even if you doyou can, of course, try the mor-tarand-pestle method of grinding It's more time-consuming. getry comes in handy: I use an electric blender to grind acorn meats to pulp in a matter of seconds. (And those oblong beauties are all meat, too: They have no pesky membranes or partitions, a do chestnuts or walnuts.) Actually though, even if you hull the crop b3 hand you'll be pleasantly surprise at how fast the pile of cleaned meat: grows. If you're hulling a particularly large quantity of acorns, you migh~ want to dry them slowly in a 100☏ oven or food dryer, allow the nuts to cool, and then pass a heavy roller over the brittle shells. (Witt a little practice, you'll have no trouble getting each nugget out intact.) Presto! Out pops the clean, white kernel! Simply grip each nut the long way and pinch. Wolf of the Ranch( Santa Ana Botanic Garden, who proposed back in 1944-that commercial growers use power vacuums to simply "inhale" acorns from the forest floor!)HOW TO SHELL THE KERNELS Acorns are best shelled with a conventional nutcracker or a pair of pliers. The work (if it can be called that) goes quickly and, in less than an hour, you should have all the acorn: you can readily process at one time (If you really want to gather the little oak nuts fast, you can take the advice of Carl B. As for the harvest itself: Your family can make old-time fun out of collecting acorns in a shady grove. You shouldn't have any trouble finding a suitable ° "hunting ground" for acorns, since some kind of oak grows in virtually every part of Our family has been doing this for some time now, and we've found acorn-meal dishes so rewarding (in taste, nutrition, and sheer fun) that we're anxious to share our "secret" with others! It's a simple matter to harvest a season's supply of acorns, process them into a coarse, meal-like flour, and adapt the flour to your favorite bread, muffin, and cake recipes. You can take advantage of some of this free bounty for yourself. What a shame more people don't recognize this yearly bumper crop for the excellent source of nutrition that it is! not just in California (where the shiny kernels are so plentiful in the fall that the natural population of jays, squirrels, and chipmunks can't even begin to eat them all), but in the rest of the country, too. And yet-appreciated by modern man or not-acorns (millions of tons of them each year) go on growing and dropping to the ground. Necessary to make the nuggets edible), and-as a result-acorns (as food for humans) went out of style in the U.S. Of nutrients contained in these kernels (perhaps because they had no patience for the laborious grinding and leaching processes that were White settlers, of course, never learned to tap the rich store Time was-back in the days when the fruit of the oak tree supported a large population of native Americans that the hills and valleys ofĬalifornia resounded with the sound of acorns being pounded in stone mortars. Look around you: One of mankind's oldest and most versatile "staple foods" is as close as your nearest park or forest.
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