Cooking With Acorns

Before I wrap up, let me give you a few example recipes that show you how to eat acorns. These are by no means the limits of what you can do with acorns, and a quick Google search will turn up several others for you.

Acorn Puddle-Cookies

This one has a story with it. The first time I tried this recipe, I used a standard cookie sheet without sides. What I didn’t know was that as the acorn meal got hot, it would run right off the sides of the sheet and land on the cooking element, setting the oven on fire. I did this two years in a row before I made a note in my recipe book. Let me save you the trouble. “Use a cookie sheet with sides.“

2 cups acorn flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon cinnamon powder
1/8-1/4 teaspoon salt (to taste)
3 Tablespoons melted butter
1 egg
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
Add up to 1/4 cups water, if needed

Mix ingredients together, and pour the mixture onto a cookie sheet (with sides). You can arrange them like cookies, but I’ve never had them hold together. Maybe you’ll have better luck than me. Bake at 350°F (175°C) for 10 minutes. By the way, this isn’t my recipe, but I can’t remember where it came from. The original version wasn’t called a puddle-cookie.

Acorn Bread

1 cup acorn meal
1 cup white flour
1 egg
1 splash olive oil
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/4-1/2 cup sugar

Mix everything together, and cook it in the oven for 30 minutes at 400°F (200°C). Optionally, you can skip the sugar and pour maple syrup over the top when it comes out of the oven.

Simple Acorn Porridge

Just mix some acorn meal with water or milk (to desired thickness), and heat it up on the stovetop. Add sugar or maple syrup to taste. Nothing fancy, but it’s a warming breakfast for a cool fall morning. Yum.

Acorn Coffee

This one is a little different than the others, because it calls for unprocessed acorns. You grind up the acorns fairly fine in a coffee grinder. Then roast them on the stovetop. Remember to keep stirring them. You want them to brown, not burn. Boil the roasted grounds in water until it suits your tastes. It’s good with a little milk. Sadly, the grounds don’t seem to work in a coffee maker. They just soak up the first of the water and become an acorn gel. The rest of the water just runs around it. To have real success with acorn coffee, you’ll need to cook it over a stovetop or fire, and then strain the grounds out afterward.

Acorn coffee is one of the few coffee substitutes that I actually enjoy. It doesn’t contain any caffeine, and the taste makes me think of fall. I’m not sure what exactly is going on that keeps this from being a bitter, astringent mess. My guess is that the roasting process somehow locks the tannins into the acorn grounds, keeping them from leeching into the coffee. But, as I say, that’s just a guess.

https://thegrownetwork.com/how-to-eat-acorns-easiest-way