Acorn Pancakes

The kids and I are on a great adventure this year- we are having a go at homeschooling. So far, it's been a lot of work! but very fun and a great challenge. We are currently studying life in Colonial America. They have never learned much of basic American history so I thought it would be a great place to start. We are also doing a basic study in plants (classification, identification). So, we those topics in mind, I thought it might be fun to go out in the woods and harvest acorns to make into colonial-style pancakes. My main objectives were to get them to be able to identify the kind of acorns we wanted and then to get a good understanding of how hard people used to have to work to get their food.
I think I we managed the last objective.
Here is the process for eating acorns- it took all evening yesterday to prepare them, the roasted over night and then we made the pancakes this morning for breakfast.
We gathered about half of a plastic grocery sack full. I didn't want to empty out the park but I wanted to make sure we had enough. It ended up making just a cup of acorn meal. About 1/3 of the acorns were bad- full of worms or rotten.









It works best to boil them in the shell for a few minutes so the knife can go in easier.

I have a great knife for this task- the end broke off so there is a blunt end that I used to dig into the shell. This took a long time but was the kind of repetative kitchen task that soothes me.
So then you have a pot of acorn meat. This needs to be boiled to remove the tannins. It smells SO good while you are doing this! Kind of like carmel and wine and brown sugar. Yum.






So I let it boil for 10 minutes and then I strained it out through a cloth in a strainer. Then you have to repeat this process over and over until the water starts to run clearer. I tasted it after a few times and it was still pretty bitter (like crazy strong walnuts) so I kept going. I'm not sure how many times I did this, maybe 10.
Then I ran the acorn meat through the food processer to make it more like a meal. If I were going to do this ever again, I would get some kind of flour mill. The food processer just didn't really work for this task.
Then the roasting. I spread it thin on cookie sheets and put it in the oven set on a real low temp (260). I roasted it like this for about 2 hours before bed (stirring ever once in awhile). Then at bed time I turned off the oven but the pilot light kept it hot enough to continue roasting over night.




In the morning, it was much darker and the taste was real mellow. I ran it through the food processer again to try and get it more like a meal, but like I said, it just isn't meant for that. So it was the best it was going to get.



This is the recipe I used:
1 cup flour
1 cup acorn meal
2 1/2 tsp baking powder
3/4 tsp salt
1 egg
1 1/4 cup milk
3 Tbs vegetable oil

We ate them with raspberry syrup we made this summer after we picked raspberries on Solstice's b-day. We also boiled up the apples we found in the woods yesterday. Yumm.

So, what did the kids think?
The pictures speak loud and clear:



Was it worth the effort? Yes.
Will we do it again anytime soon? No.