"Wild breads part one" how to make great tasting and nutritious breads from the edible plants in your backyard.

I’ve been planning to write this tutorial in the late summer, just before acorns start to fall.  However, I changed my mind after being forced to eat a ham sandwich between two slices of a white, tasteless foamy substance that stuck so tightly to the roof of my mouth that I was forced to remove it with my fingernail.  Most Americans somewhat naively refer to this as bread?  Then, I watched a “survival” show where a skinny man with a funny name and a British accent walked through a deciduous forest eating bugs and drinking urine to sustain him, as he literally trod upon all the ingredients needed for a freaking cake!  After an angry rant about pee drinking numbskulls and packing foam masquerading as food that caused everyone in the room to think I was nutty as a squirrel turd and possibly a danger to myself, and the American way of life, I decided to go ahead and post this.

Remember, it is up to you to properly identify the plant in question. I have chosen what I think are easy plants that most everyone should know.  I cannot and will not identify it for you in this blog.  I will help you along on this, but the job of being sure you got the right plant rest squarely on your shoulders.

Acorn Flour

 Acorns have a lot of protein, carbohydrates and fats, not to mention minerals such as calcium, potassium, phosphorus and iron. Plus a few vitamins, niacin being the only one I can remember at the moment. (Ever been hit in the head?  I have.  It hurts, and if you do it enough, it plays with your memory.)  To make a long story short, a handful of acorns have roughly the nutritional equivalent of a pound of ground beef.  They have been the main dietary staple of countless cultures around the world. One mature oak tree can produce almost 1,000 pounds of acorns in a single year.  Paleolithic tribes would even go to war over the best stands of oak trees.  Top that off with the fact that when they are properly prepared, they taste good.  It makes me wonder why so many have forgotten them as a source of food.

Acorns, as they fall from the tree, taste bitter.  This is because they are high in tannins.  These must be leached out in water, but I’ll explain more about that later.

Grabbing some…. I mean gathering your…. nuts…err…acorns, yeah gathering acorns .  Acorns fall from the trees in the fall. (Woo hoo!  We’re learning, huh?  Don’t be scared.  We’ll do it together.)  The exact time depends on the type of oak, weather, and location.  I suggest gathering acorns in the morning as soon as you can and gathering every day.  If you leave them, something else will eat them.  But don’t worry about starving the poor, fuzzy, cute things they will get theirs, trust me.   The  acorns you pick up will be green,  green and tan, or brown. The green ones have just fallen from the tree and aren't ripe yet.  Pick them up too, as they will ripen to a dark brown in a couple of days.  As you are gathering acorns, throw out any acorns that have any holes, cracks or signs of mold. (I also suggest hopping around erratically until you find an acorn, then holding it up to your face while looking around to see if anyone is trying to steal it.  Its good exercise, promotes situational awareness, and seems to work for the squirrels).

Extracting the… uh… acorn… meat.  Take the ripe acorns (the dark brown ones) remove the caps, then crack the shells to remove the meat.  I usually use a nutcracker, but a hammer works fine (as long as you remember it’s an acorn and not that jock or cheerleader that made every day of high school for you a descent in to hell….. it’s just an acorn….. and it’s time to heal).  If you don’t own a nutcracker or a hammer, or just feel the need to go caveman.  You can use a rock, but choose your rock well and go easy there, Grog.  It can make your flour gritty.

 Acorns contain tannins (tannic acid).  This gives them a bitter taste and if you ingest too much of it, can make you sick.  The Native Americans leached acorns by putting them in a sack and placing the sack in flowing water for a few days.  Thank God, there is a quicker way, two of them to my knowledge.  The first is to take the acorn meats and put them in a pot of boiling water for a few minutes until the water is dark brown.  Then, strain out the meats and repeat the process until the acorns have a sweet nutty flavor.  It is important to remember that the water must always be boiling before you put the acorns in.  Putting acorns in cold water seems to lock the tannins in.  The second way is to grind the acorn meat, then place the ground meats in to a colander or sieve and stir them under hot water from a faucet until they have a sweet nutty flavor.  Remember that different types of acorns have different levels of tannins.  White oaks have little and usually only require one boiling, whereas red oaks usually take four.  Leach them to suit your taste, but even if you don’t think they need it, all acorns should be leached at least once.

Drying and grinding your….acorn… meats.  With your acorns leached, dry them out as much as you can with towels.  Then spread them out thinly, but evenly, on a pan. You can place the pan in the sun to dry or bake them in an oven until, you guessed it, dry. Once your acorns are dry, grind them in to a flour.  I use a mortar and pestle, but if you can afford some overpriced kitchen contraption that does the same thing, good for you.

Ta daaa! Acorn flour is very heavy, so for most breads and cakes you will likely want to mix it with a lighter flour such as cattail flour. (Yep, that’s right.  We are making that too.  Aren’t we industrious little bipeds?)  It is also one of the best pork breadings I have ever used.

 

Cattail Flour

Cattails, aka the super WalMart of the swamp,  produce eight different food products. They have countless functional uses and half a dozen medicinal uses.  Seriously, if you kill a roll of duct tape, it comes back as a cattail.  Furthermore, cattails produce more food per acre than any other plant, excluding algae and lichens.  The roots alone can produce 32 tons of finished flour.

Perhaps one day I will devote post to cattails. However, in this post I just don’t have the time. So we will just be dealing with the roots, which are available year round.

 

Cattails do have a few look-alikes.  One of them is poisonous.  Fortunately, none of these have the hotdog -like seed head.  However, as I said, it is up to you to make the proper identification.  Also, because cattails grow in water, toxins in the water collect and concentrate in the plant.  So be sure to harvest cattails from a clean source, preferably in moving water, and certainly away from cities, towns and road sides (unless you want your flour to taste like condoms, cigarette butts, and french fry packets….. and kill you).  You know what?  Just avoid harvesting near people.  People carry diseases,  litter the ground with refuse and chemicals, all while trying to tell you about this “great new reality show” that you simply have to watch.

Once you find a suitable stand of cattails, well, it’s time to wade out in to the water and pull some up. But you can’t just grab the stalk and pull.  If you do, it will break off and you will fall over backwards into the water.  Trust me on this.  Then you will stand up soaking wet and look around to see if any one saw you.  (See, harvesting away from people has other benefits.)  Run your hand down the stalk and into the mud until you feel the roots running horizontally away from the plant.  This is where you pull.  Once you pull the roots up, cut off the stalk if it came with it.

Clean the roots off in the sink, then peel them with a sharp knife or a potato peeler.  Break and crush the roots in a bowl of water.  The starch, soon to be flour, will break up and fall away from the fibrous strands.  Continue this process until the starch has been removed from strands.  Remove the strands and let the bowl sit for a few hours, until the starch settles at the bottom.  Pour off the water and spread the starch out on a pan to dry.  You can let it dry in the sun, but I always dry mine in the oven. Once dry, grind it into a powder.

Warning this flour does contain some gluten.

Now for cattail flour recipe number two.  In the summer, the male pollen head produces an abundance of yellow pollen the constancy of powdered chalk.  Bend the pollen heads over a bucket and shake.  It’s quite easy to collect a pound or two of pollen in an hour, and there you go.  No cutting, no boiling, no nothing.  You have cattail flour.  It has a sweet, corn-like taste, but distinct from corn.

 

Acorn Cattail Sweet Bread

 2 cups of acorn flour

2 cups of cattail flour (you can use wheat flour if you don’t have cattail, or if you hate anything that taste like anything, use white flour)

 3 teaspoons of baking powder

1/3 cup of honey, sugar, or maple syrup

1 egg

1/2 of cup milk

3 tablespoons of acorn oil or olive oil (any oil should do)

 Bake at 375 degrees for about 45 minutes (Even better, bake until done.)

Well, this is enough to get you started.  There are countless other edible plants out there that can be used to create delicious, wholesome breads.  But we’ll talk about them in part two: Revenge of the Wild Breads.  But until then, I’m going to go make a decent ham sandwich.