Humans can not eat acorns unless they are shelled, crushed, and rinsed continuously overnight. Example: place them in a cloth bag, and tie them to a rock in a running stream. Then you may boil them and cook them as you would oatmeal. Acorns contain tannins, just as oak trees do, which makes them toxic unless you remove the tannins.
Now...that's all well and good, unless you run into one of these:
@4meAndyou I gathered some acorns when I was 9 years old living in Nebraska. I shelled them, boiled them in a very salty water & black stuff boiled out, threw the water out & boiled in clean water with another bunch of salt in it, more black came out. Threw that away & boiled once again. Then I put them on a cookie sheet and baked them. They tasted kind of like salty roasted nuts. I don’t know how I knew to do it, it was an experiment but that’s how they do it now to make acorn flour, it is something Cherokees do. I’ve also eaten boiled acorns in Morocco, they are gathered from the many cork oak trees they have growing there (corks being Produced and used for wine bottles). They were a lot bigger than the acorns here & quite mealy dry in texture.
@4meAndyou I tried it again about 14 years ago with fresh acorns that had just fallen off the oak trees at the university. I boiled them 3 times & couldn’t get all the tannins out & ended up throwing them away. I don’t know if they are easier to work with if they are several months old and cured out or if it’s certain varieties of oak trees that have acorns with less tannins in them.
@cherokeepatti If you decide to try it again, crush them first, put them in a cloth bag and leave them in running water, like the stream I mentioned, overnight. That works every time without salt.
@4meAndyou Well someone else owns it now and unless it goes on the market for sale then it wouldnt even be an option even if I had the money. I wouldn’t mind buy property in the little village 2 miles away and doing something there, no streams but a river not too far away.
