This slowly removes the tannins, but leaves the acorn flour raw so it’ll still bind in baked goods.Īfter leaching, the flour is ground again, then sifted and dried thoroughly. Cold Leaching – This method grinds the shelled acorn nut meats very fine and then leaches it in cold water for 7 to 14, with water changes twice a day.This also cooks the acorns and removes much of their starch, meaning they’re not as good for baked goods since the flour won’t bind. Hot Leaching – Basically boiling the shelled acorns for hours in many changes of water until the tannins are removed.If you’ve never made acorn flour, be aware that it does require a good bit of processing to leach out the natural tannins present in the acorns. Her family is gluten-free, so she’s worked hard to develop recipes that are made either with all acorn flour or with just a bit of gluten-free flour mix added to improve texture. Her acorn book is by far the best resource I’ve found to date on cooking with acorn flour. I recently came across a recipe in the book Acorn Foraging by Alicia Bayer, and when I saw that these acorn flour chocolate chip cookies are made with 100% acorn flour I just had to try them.Īlicia is the woman behind the blog A Magical Childhood and she writes about foraging and homeschooling, both online and in print. It works well enough using hazelnut flour and other wild-foraged flours, but it’s really hard to skip the wheat flour in acorn flour recipes. That’s my passion, and I’ve been experimenting with recipes for 100% wild foraged cookies for some time now. There’s something of a “holy grail of foraging” which is foods made entirely from wild foraged ingredients, without leaning on conventional agriculture. I really want to master cooking with just acorn flour. The problem is, I don’t just want to add a bit of acorn flavor to something. The acorn flour adds flavor, and the wheat flour gives structure and good texture. If you’re willing to make hybrid recipes, you’ll get great results substituting no more than 1/4 to 1/3 of the total wheat flour for acorn flour in a conventional recipe. That’s because acorn flour actually has a lot of starch, so much starch in fact that it’s used traditionally to make a tofu-like jelly in Korea called Dotorimuk.įine ground acorn flour behaves a bit like rice flour in baking, and acorn flour baked goods can be a bit “gooey” in texture unless you add a good bit of wheat flour for structure (and gluten). I’ve been experimenting with acorn flour recipes for a few years now, and I’ll admit that I’ve had more failures than successes.īaking with acorn flour is tricky, and while you’d assume you can substitute this wild foraged nut flour in place of other nut flours like almond flour…the results are just not the same. Acorn flour chocolate chip cookies are one of the tastiest ways to cook with acorn flour.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |