Acorn "coffee"

Acorn season has been over for a while but we still have a jar of acorn 'coffee' in the cupboard that we made in November. This was surprisingly easy to make, if a little fiddly.  The taste isn't really like coffee, but it's warm and nutty.

First we gathered acorns. We collected them from the ground where two 50+ year old oak trees had recently been cut down. We skipped any that were sprouting, cracked, soft, or green and went for the ones with a brown, smooth shell.

We were half following a couple of different recipes we'd seen online, this is roughly what we did:

We chucked the acorns whole in a pan, covered generously with water and boiled vigorously for 15-20 minutes. This kills anything on/in the acorns and removes some of the abundant tannins (bitter and theoretically poisonous in large quantities). It also softens them up ready for the next step.

After they'd been boiled we let them cool down enough to handle and start shelling. This was a bit fiddly but after you've done a few you find a rhythm. They were soft enough that either by squeezing or using our thumbnails we could crack them in half and pop them out of their shells. Some came out a lot easier than others. 

This didn't need our whole attention and we sat on the floor shelling and chatting with a cup of tea as we made our way through the pile. Shelling acorns is one of those repetitive tasks that can be quite therapeutic/relaxing.

Next we dried them out in a dry frying pan over medium heat, keeping them moving so they didn't catch. Once they had stopped steaming and were dry and smelling like toasted nuts they could be ground down.

In this next photo you can see the manual grinder we tried and gave up with pretty quickly, too much work for poorly ground acorns. The electric grinder was much better, we whizzed them up in a few batches.

Once they were ground to about the consistency of ground coffee it was back to the dry frying pan for roasting. This needed a close eye and constant stirring.

As we roasted the acorn grounds they darkened significantly, we checked the taste at a couple of different points by making up a mugful in a cafetiere. In the end, we roasted the acorn grounds until they looked like ground coffee. 

To make a cup we put 2-3 rounded teaspoons in a cafetiere with enough water for a cup and let brew for 5-10 minutes or so. Warning this isn't like coffee and it absorbs a lot of water so put more water in than you think you need. This is also a problem if you try to make it in a percolator, the acorn coffee swells and blocks the steam meaning that the pressure can't escape. The only time we tried to make some in the percolator the safety valve went off and sprayed steam across the kitchen!

It's difficult to describe what this tastes like, it reminds us of tea (the tannins and the way it feels in your mouth) and hot chocolate or nut butter (the taste). It's mild and comforting, just what you want from a hot drink. Also caffeine free. It's lovely with some plant milk (the one in the photo is good, a recent discovery that doesn't split in hot drinks but doesn't have an overpowering flavour).