This week on the Local Food Report, we look at acorns, chestnuts, and hickories on the commercial food scene.
Michelle Ajamian and Amy Miller of Ohio first started collaborating when they got a grant to figure out how to sell less-than-perfect chestnuts.
“Grade A chestnuts sell for a good price,” Ajamian says. “Grade B chestnuts are always there. They accounted for, I don't know, 20 percent of the harvest. So, we started looking at how can we value-add Grade B chestnuts.”
The solution is to turn grade B chestnuts into flour. They’re perfectly delicious, just not as pretty as grade A.
Miller is a chestnut grower and runs a chestnut processing cooperative and Ajamian heads up the Appalachian Staple Foods Collaborative, which is working to develop a regional food system centered on local grains, seeds, beans, and nuts. The two turned their attention to acorn processing.
“This company wanted acorn flour,” Ajamian says. “And that made me turn around and go back to the funder—that was the USDA—for another grant. [I] said, ‘Hey, we could look at how to mix acorns in because chestnut processing and sales are done by the end of December, even earlier. And then here's this facility that's idle. Let's use it. Let's experiment. And let's look at how we can experiment also with a coffee roaster to get different flavor profiles on both nuts.’”
From a basic processing perspective, the steps to clean, shell, and dry and grind chestnuts and acorns into flour are similar. And the equipment at Miller’s chestnut processing cooperative works well for both. Still, she says, acorns have some distinct challenges.
“I guess the difference is between acorns and chestnuts,” Miller says. “You know, when we're processing our chestnuts, we can consume and taste the chestnuts every step along the way and do some quality control kind of based on flavor in our kind of like culinary experience. With the acorn flour, it's harder for us to know what's good or not, because the uncooked, unprocessed acorn is really not very palatable.”
This is because straight off the tree, just like olives, acorns are filled with bitter tannins that are water soluble and later need to be leached out. To make matters more complicated, oak trees do something called masting, where each species produces a bumper crop in some years and a small crop in others.
“You know, let's say we want red oaks every year,” Miller says. “Well, where are the red oaks masting? Do we have people there who can collect and supply acorns if they're not masting locally? And or, you know, we're in central Appalachia, we have lots of different oak species around. Can we take whichever oak species is masting in a certain year, how do we treat those acorns and process them so that we have an expected product every year where someone's going to be able to buy acorn flour year after year and know that they're getting something good, regardless of what acorn species are going into it.”
It’s a challenge, Miller says, but one that she enjoys. She’s a research scientist by training and our conversation reminded me that every major staple food we see on shelves today has already had decades, centuries, or even millennia of research put into it.
Ajamian says there are plenty of products out there when it comes to our native nut species—the trick is in the processing.
“Hickory and oak are ubiquitous east of the Mississippi, and my goodness, we should be eating them” Ajamian says.
There is already a regional processing facility for one of our abundant native nut trees in the East: Hammons Black Walnuts, which has been buying from wild harvesters and farmers and processing and selling both nuts and flour for 80 years.
