A Slightly Sooty Salad:Toasted Acorn Stardust Crust

After a stalled attempt to make food with acorns last year, I was inspired to try again this year after reading Octavia Butler’s “Parable of the Sower.” In it, the main character, Lauren Olamina, is a teenager who lives in an imagined future United States (which happens to be the mid-2020s for a book published in 1993) where there is a great deal of death and suffering as a result of social and political breakdown. Despite the terrible things that are happening in Olamina’s world, her bravery and drive to adapt and survive burn steady and bright.

It is hard not to love Olamina for the tremendous hope and optimism she brings. One of the ways Olamina and her family adapt is by studying the practices of the Indigenous peoples who thrived in North America before modern agriculture. She and her family learn to use acorns and other forgotten native sources of food. Olamina’s enjoyment of acorns goes beyond survival, though. Her memories of enjoying warm, fresh-baked acorn bread studded with dried fruits and nuts remind her of a time of safety and togetherness with her family—something she later loses in the story. By playing around with acorns in our kitchens, we can bring a little of that magic into our homes, connecting with traditions that go back to the first humans to inhabit our environment and to the imagination of the novelist Octavia Butler and the bright star she created in Lauren Olamina.

So now that we have our inspiration squared away, the work will be a breeze. To recap from our last installment: find some acorns, store them in the refrigerator, and crack them open when you’re ready. Puree your acorns in a blender with some water—the finer the particles of flour become, the better. Set up a cloth filter of some kind in a strainer. You can use a coffee filter, but we found this very slow to drain. We switched to a nylon filter sheet of the kind used to filter maple syrup. That worked well, but was expensive at $18 shipped. One experienced YouTuber recommends using an unbleached flannel cloth—something we’ll try in the future.

Pour your acorn flour mixture into the filter and pour water over it repeatedly. Each time the water filters through, it pulls out some of the water-soluble tannins that give acorns their bitter taste (and can make us sick in high concentrations). Different types of oak trees produce acorns with more or fewer tannins, so taste will tell you when the flour is ready. We didn’t count, but I’d guess it took 20 to 30 refills to wash away the flour’s bitterness.

When your flour is ready, the first and easiest thing to make is acorn milk. We lifted up our filter full of damp flour and squeezed out as much of the remaining moisture as possible into a bowl. This liquid has tiny particles of acorn starch suspended in it. We briefly boiled the milk, then added some sugar, cinnamon, cardamom, and a pinch of salt. Simple and delicious.

Our next project was to build an acorn flour pie crust. My partner tells me that form is important in this (pie) realm and that our open-face apple pie on an acorn crust is less misleading if we call it a galette. Playing around with names is also a little light psychological manipulation to make sure you don’t expect to bite into a flaky, buttery pie crust. The texture and flavor of this crust will be something new.

You can dry your flour in a dehydrator to make it shelf-stable—or skip that step if you store it in the freezer or use it within a few days. Add one-quarter cup of maple syrup and a pinch of salt to two cups of non-dehydrated flour, mix well, and mold the crust with your fingers into a buttered nine-inch pie plate. We baked the crust at 350 degrees for 30 to 40 minutes until it turned a dark brown color and was dry to the touch. We filled the crust with our stovetop-prepared apple pie filling and baked it for another 40 to 50 minutes, until the filling was bubbling in the center.

My partner and I both enjoyed the unique flavor and texture that the acorns added to the dessert. Even our kids claimed to like it—though I feel like their investment in the gathering, shelling, and leaching process helped push their reviews toward positive. If I were to make it again, I’d add an egg, a couple of tablespoons of butter, an additional tablespoon or two of maple syrup, and some cinnamon. The other option is to mix the acorn flour with wheat or another flour to lighten the flavor, but we wanted the pure acorn experience.

We’re excited to continue our acorn adventure and plan to try an intriguing recipe for a “maple and acorn flour torte” from Alan Bergo’s Forager Chef website—only one cup of acorn flour is needed. Hope you can try a recipe of your own!