Acorn Coffee

One of my targets for this month-long blogging festival was to complete as many of the posts from the last Blaugust that I planned but never got around to completing as I could. When Blaugust rolled around last year we'd just moved from Oxford to Southampton, and were particularly enjoying the novelty of having the wonderful Southampton Common, a lovely rambling public park on our doorstep. To celebrate, I was hoping to do a series of posts about collecting various edible bits and pieces from the park and turning them into delicious goodies. This plan didn't eventuate as we gorged ourselves on blackberries (Mrs Owl more than me, as is our custom), but that's about it, except for a slowly-growing bowl of acorns that we collected by our kitchen window. 

That post never happened, but the acorns have been sitting there taunting me, growing slowly older and occasionally smaller as I threw out the obviously mouldy and wormy ones. And here we are, on a sunny afternoon in April, and I've decided that I'm going to do something with them: it's acorn coffee time. Sadly, we don't have all that many acorns left, but hopfully it'll be enough for a trial run, and if it's terrible at least I won't have needlessly deprived the local squirrels of too many lunches.

I first heard of acorn coffee being drunk by desperately under-provisioned confederate soldiers in the Starbuck series. The Starbuck books (Rebel, Copperhead, Battle Flag and Bloody Ground) are possibly the most Bernard Cornwall of all the Bernard Cornwall books, so if you like the sort of thing where the ragged but dashing apolitical but caught in the wrong place at the wrong time bad-boy hero beats the baddies and the fancy boys, wins the war and gets the girl, a genre that I admit I have a bit of a sort spot for, you can do a lot worse. If you search acorn coffee online you do seem to get a lot of hits from civil war reenactors and the like, a few posts saying boring things like "don't eat acorns they're poison", but not a whole lot of links to people actually selling it as if it's the sort of thing that people would actually want to put in their bodies, which isn't a great sign, but we've started the post and we're committed now, so we gotta follow through.

First things first, pop your acorns in a pan and boil them for quarter of an hour or so, to soak off some of the poisonous tannin stuff and to kill any bugs that you've somehow missed in the last few months.  This was a good chance to use this pan, which Mrs. Owl brought back from India and is useless for almost everything, since anything and everything sticks to it and it's impossible to keep clean. I think we only keep it because it seems cruel to inflict it on someone else.

Drain off your acorns and proceed to shell them. This could take a long time if you had a big pile of acorns, but with this many it was pretty easy, especially since these acorns are all getting a little old and soft. Most of them I could easily pull apart with my fingers, and those that I couldn't could be cut into with a kitchen knife easily enough. The nuts produced ranged all over the grey-brown-black colour spectrum, but mostly seemed solid and, I guess, nutty, so that seemed hopeful.

Roast the nuts until they smell like roasted, earthy nuts, I had them on for about 10 minutes, and then coarsely grind. Sadly, my mortar and pestle is in storage on another continent, but we have a stab mixer with a chopping attachment that works pretty well for this sort of stuff. It went a little weird and discouloured a few years ago when we were making gingerbread and can't be cleaned properly, but it still cuts and it's stopped infusing everything that you put in it with nutmeg, so it does the job. At this point, the grind smells almost like nutmeg, but it has nothing to do with the mixer, it's all the acorns!

Lightly roast the grind again, being careful not to burn it. Once the edges start going a darker brown, grab the whole thing out of the oven. I think I left mine in a little bit too long when I got distracted reading Plato, which gave the whole thing a strong smoky aroma, but I think I rescued it just in time. 

Grind again, then serve like you would coffee. I imagine pretty much any coffee-brewing method would work as long as you can get the grind about right. Unfortunately, we're not coffee family, and I don't have a coffee pot at home, and I'm not quite sure how I managed to get this far along in the process before I realised this slight snag in the plan. I tried using a tea-ball, but I'd already ground my 'coffee' fine enough for filters , so it more or less went strgiht though. In desperation, I emptied some tea bags in the pot, refilled them with my grind and stapled them closed again.

Here it is, the moment of truth. I make a few cups, one with sugar, one without, one with milk, and force Mrs Owl, who doesn't like coffee but does like trying new things, especially if they're a little bit out of left field, to take a short coffee break and act as guinea pig. She proclaimed the smell 'smoky, like Russian Caravan', the first taste 'not like poison', and eventually opted for the milky option, which she said tasted like 'a mix of coffee, tea and wood, but in a nice way' and 'better than coffee, at least'. Most importantly, she said she'd happily try it again, which I though was pretty encouraging.

For myself, I found the black coffee to be a little weak (possibly something that could be overcome by just using more), but generally pleasant, without the sharpness of coffee but with a lot the same bitter and sour notes, especially in the aftertaste, and I also opted for a slightly sweetened option with milk (the same way I take my coffee normally). I found this to be reminiscent of a homemade mocha of  instant coffee and hot chocolate: I definitely wouldn't say that it was better than coffee, but it hit a lot of the same buttons. I would also happily try it again sometime, which is a little unfortunate because we probably only have enough left for about one more cup each and it's a long time until the acorns start dropping again. 

Assuming that this isn't the last post on the Leaflocker when we both drop dead later this afternoon, we're definitely going to have to pick up a lot more acorns next year; so if you see a couple of people scouring Southampton Common next August or so, do come and say hi!

This was my fourteenth post for Blapril, the latest incarnation of the annual Blaugust blogging festival that the Leaflocker has been a proud member of the last few years. Do check out some of the posts that others have been creating, especially if you're interested in the daily adventures of the gamerfolk. I've been enjoying Dextraneous' ongoing Pokemon review series since he began it, and he's just reached the end of the first generation, showing no signs of slowing down.