This post may contain affiliate links. Sasha eating potato are an abundant wild food source around the world, and a single tree can produce more than 2,000 pounds of nuts. Rich in calories and micronutrients, eating acorns was once a part of life for humans everywhere that oaks grow. While these days acorn recipes are mostly associated with Native Americans, they were a part of the traditional food supply in Greece, Italy, Spain, North Africa and throughout Asia.
Oaks continue to produce abundant nutrition for humankind, even if we’ve largely forgotten how to harvest and prepare this free food source. This year, my family made it our mission to collect and process as many acorns as possible. I’d planned on developing recipes for all our favorite foods using acorn flour, but when I started researching acorn recipes I learned that I was trying to rediscover the wheel. Humans have been eating acorns since the stone age, and just about every culture has traditional recipes for acorns. The earliest evidence of humans eating acorns comes from an archeological site near the dead sea dated to around 750,000 BC.
Similar sites exist in North America, Africa, Spain, Italy, Central Europe, Japan, and the Middle East. Acorn oil is still produced in the middle east, and an Arabian acorn-based drink was what eventually became modern hot cocoa. Acorn-based foods are produced commercially in Korea, for a savory tofu-like acorn gel and acorn udon noodles. The Romans were eating acorns at the peak of their civilization, and native American tribes in the western US still process acorns using traditional methods. Eating acorns is a part of our history as a species, reaching to all parts of the globe. Basics of Eating Acorns Acorns are technically a nut, but more varieties are starchy and low in both oil and protein. They also contain tannins, which are not only unpalatable, they’re also anti-nutrients and they bind up minerals within your body.
The tannins must be leached from the acorns prior to consumption. That means they’re most commonly ground into flour, which increases their surface area for faster tanning leaching and leaves a starchy, flour-like food that can be used for baking. Types of Acorns There are hundreds of species of oak trees around the world, and each will have a different nutritional profile. Some are higher in oil, tannins or micronutrients than others. While a few species are recorded, there’s been surprisingly little research into the nutrition inside acorns because they’re not a common food crop in the modern world.