Acorn Flour

So I finally got around to finishing the acorn flour! There was a little delay while I purchased some cheesecloth, but most of the delay was me just plain forgetting to work on it 😀

When I left off I had ground the acorns to coarse sized particles and soaked them in water in the refrigerator to pull out the tannins. I decided to make acorn flour, so the next step was to dry it out before the final grind into flour. To begin removing the water I used a fine mesh sieve and some cheesecloth.

Most of the water drained on its own, but a couple squeezes finished off what I could get out before the final drying step. The strained water still has some utility. As you can see in the picture below, it is very white in color. This is because there is some starch and fat from the acorns in the water.

To collect the starch and fat, I had to first let it settle out before pouring off the water. I’ve read that you can add this starch and fat back in with the ground acorns before drying, but this time I decided to dry it out separately. I’ll then add it back into the ground flour once it is dry as well. When all the water is out, it looks something like the picture below. I could have saved even more of this as I lost some when I was removing the tannins. Each time I poured off the water with the tannins, there was definitely a little bit of starch/fat that also got poured off. Maybe next time I’ll try to salvage some more, but it seemed like a lot of extra effort for just a little bit of starch/fat.

To get the remaining moisture out I decided to use the oven. The unfortunate part about using the oven is that too much heat will begin to roast the acorns. It would have been better if I had a dehydrator…I guess that’s as good a reason as any for me to finally get around to building a solar dehydrator 🙂 I’ll get that built before I process my remaining acorns. That way we can compare it to the oven method!

I tried to keep the temperature in the oven low, but there is only so much I could do. The lowest temperature setting on our oven is 170 °F, so I didn’t even let it fully preheat before turning it off. I kept repeating this back and forth to try and keep the temperature around 100 °F. Even with the lower temperature I’m pretty certain I roasted the acorns a little. There is also a chance that some oxidation is responsible for some of the color change.

Once I had it dry it was time to grind it down to a powder. I used a cheap spice grinder that I already had. Depending on how this goes, once we are on the homestead and we start processing more acorns I can always buy something better. I decided to take out the larger pieces to make it a little easier on the grinder. I didn’t have much to grind, so it went pretty quickly. About one minute worth of grinding was all it took!

Now that we have the final products, I need to decide what to make with the acorn flour. I had hoped to have it used already before this post, but that just didn’t happen. I don’t think anyone should be surprised by that at this point 😀 I definitely want to choose something that typically uses wheat flour, but might benefit from a little acorn flour substitution. That way I can make a second batch without acorn flour to compare the two. The things I am currently thinking about are: muffins, bread, or pancakes.

If you have a preference from the list above of something you would like to see me make with the acorn flour please leave a comment below. Please leave a comment as well if you have a different suggestion that I don’t have listed above! 

Thanks for stopping by and take care!!