Several years ago in Maine during the pandemic, I met a woman named Lisa Willey who was experimenting with eating acorns.
"So my kids who are in their 20s probably were under 10. And, you know, those like scholastic book fairs. I don't know if you remember those at all. And the kids would go and I would pick out books with them. And there was a book by a children's writer, Jean Craighead George."
The book is called My Side of the Mountain. And in it, a boy runs away from New York City and survives in the Catskills eating acorns.
"And I was like, wow, you can eat acorns? I just can't believe I didn't know because I was always someone who picked things up off the ground and think, well, can I. This is interesting. I picked up a lot of acorns, but. I read that book, and that's basically I did exactly what she said to do and I made acorn flour, so."
To make acorn flour you have to leach the bitter tannins out of the nuts, and you do this by cracking them, grinding up the nutmeats, and then soaking them in repeated changes of water until the bitterness is gone and you get a flour that’s mild flavored and slightly sweet. Also very much into baking baking sourdough, Lisa decided to try feeding her starter acorn flour.
"I fed it acorn flour, and then I made a bread with it, which turned out to be kind of a crumbly slate, like a small brick, a crumbly brick, which didn't taste bad. It just it just wasn't pleasant. You couldn't really eat it. It was just a crumbly a crumble. So I think the chickens got most of that. Yeah. So that's when I had to do the bottom, you know, I had to do like the rock bottom. Is this going to work at all?"
Next, Lisa started mixing just a little bit of acorn flour into a mostly wheat flour sourdough starter. And this went much better.
"I think the bacteria just must have loved the something that was in the acorn, maybe a certain amount of sweetness or the sugars. I mean, acorn is—it—it is a very high protein nut, but it's very high carbohydrate nut."
And like corn flour, acorn flour doesn’t have gluten. This is why Lisa’s first batch of sourdough with no wheat flour came out so crumbly. You need at least some gluten in the bread to form the stretchy strands that create the dough’s structure.
"My go to ratio would be probably about a third of acorn flour, but you really have to have the gluten in there."
After succeeding with sourdough Lisa started making acorn recipes that didnt rely on gluten—pancakes and tortillas worked well, as did a sort of acorn flour cornbread. She also tried a fermented vegan cheese using acorns, and acorn tempeh.
"But I became sort of obsessed with it. So I was a mom who I homeschooled my kids and I took them to all their sporting events or whatever sat around. And I'd like to have busy hands and I would bring a basket of acorns and a lobster cracker and just crack acorns throughout an entire soccer game or whatever."
Lisa Willey told me that when she first started working with acorns more than a decade ago, almost no one she met seemed to know that you could eat the nuts—though she knew from reading about Indigenous lifeways in North America and Europe that they’ve long been an important food in many cultures. But over the past decade people’s awareness about this history and about acorns edibility seems to be slowly growing. This year is what’s called a mast year for acorns, which means a year when the oak trees work together to produce an abundance of nuts — production with oaks varies for reasons we don’t totally understand. But regardless of why there are so many, it’s an excellent time to pick up a basket full of acorns and start experimenting.
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Elspeth sat with Lisa Willey and recorded this interview in March of 2021 and when she went to reach out to her recently she discovered that Lisa had suddenly passed away. Members of her community have said that every time they hear an acorn drop they think of her.
