Oak trees, Acorn flour & dye

Good morning, I'm Sally Poynter and it's a really pretty morning today, rather nicer than the misty one that I filmed a few weeks ago. Now I've just come through the maize field so I'm looking a bit splattered with water and red around the face where all the maize leaves have been whipping at me, but mostly today I've come out to have a look at some really nice oak trees. I do love oak trees. You might hear machinery in the background, there's a great big tractor on caterpillar tracks doing something a couple of fields away, but we're going to cross the field and find some nice oak trees and introduce ourselves to them. Now oak trees are quite widespread in the temperate areas of the northern hemisphere. You find them across the vast bulk of Europe, you find them through North America and there are other places around the world where you find oaks as well. In fact there's something like 500 different species of them, but the ones we find in Britain mostly are the English oak and the Sessile oak. There's a huge amount of folklore around oak trees. These ones are being managed at the moment and the farmers have been trimming old and diseased wood which will prolong their life for a very long time now. But one of the things you find with oak trees, often because they're the biggest tree in the forest or they stand out by themselves like this, is they get lightning blasted quite easily and quite a lot of the folklore to do with oak trees has to do with lightning and thunder and storms and you'll often find that gods associated with thunder get the oak associated with them. They're also associated with victory, so you will find lots of classical examples of victorious warriors being crowned with oak leaves and that survives to today in modern military awards where the oak tree is a common motif. One of the easiest ways to tell the difference between the Dermest and English oak is when the acorns are on the tree because they sit on the branches differently. Can you see that these acorns sit pretty much straight on the branch? Let's see if I can find another one to show you. So there's no stalks to these, they pretty much spring straight from the little twigs. This one means it's a Sessile oak. There are other differences but quite often this is the fastest way to tell the difference and it's a beautiful beautiful oak. Not entirely sure how old this one is, it could easily be 400 years or more, they can easily live to be a thousand years old. A lot of the ones you see in parklands and fields in Britain are going to be two to four hundred years quite easily and they are amazing trees for biodiversity. Somebody calculated a number of years ago now that an oak tree will support a greater variety of biodiversity than any other of the native trees in Britain, so they're amazing things and we're really pleased to have them. At one time there were vast forests of oak trees throughout Britain and their wood is tied into the architecture not only of the buildings in Britain but also the ships that at one point made its navy so very famous and you do see oak trees in vast amounts of place names and in local anecdotes. They're not just majestic trees though, they've got lots of different uses. I've talked about oak galls in previous videos which are fantastic for things like ink making and dyeing but today for this video it's really the acorns I want to focus on. I'm very lucky that we've actually got a small oak tree right at the end of the garden so today I'm collecting acorns from this. Now when you're gathering your acorns, watch out for ones with holes, you don't want those. These really are lovely big acorns, some of the biggest I've seen right on my doorstep, can't be bad. Now there is of course more than one way to process acorns for eating, they need to be leached which is soaking them to remove the tannins and that can either be done hot or it can be done cold. Now I'm going to be using a cold leaching process for this batch and the main reason for that is I don't want the starches to cook out, I want the end resulting flour to be able to thicken when it's cooked. This is quite a little batch, I've actually got several on the go in different stages but they're really really straightforward to process. These have all fallen from the tree naturally so even though a few of them are green shelled still they were certainly ripe enough to drop under their own steam. Some people like to leave them to dry in their shells for a day or two because that makes the meat inside shrink away a little bit but it doesn't make a huge difference to my mind. You're going to need something to whack them with so I have my pet kitchen rock, everyone needs a pet kitchen rock and it's just a case of squashing them so I put them blunt end down, pointy end up, give them a little whack until you can peel off the green shell or green in this case, most of them are brown and that's the acorn meat inside. Pop that to one side, let's do a brown one this time. You don't have to whack them terribly hard and you can see inside it's quite a nice fresh creamy colour, you'll soon see if you've got any that are discoloured or they've got anything living in them you'll find out very very quickly. So all I'm going to do is crack all of my nuts and I'm saving the husks because I want to use them as part of a dye bath otherwise they can go away and leaving them half like this is absolutely fine. I've got friends who like to put theirs through the food processor first to make the surface area bigger otherwise just use a little knife, cut them into bits and when you've done as many as you need for your particular batch and generally the more the better when you're doing this sort of thing, anything laborious is often best done in quantity and you have to do it once. A little bit of dark there, this is very much like dealing with apples or potatoes, you just need to use your common sense to whether that's something to worry about or not, if in doubt and actually I think that's probably fine, if in doubt leave it out so we'll just put that out of the way. So you're going to chop it up, these are going to go into a dish, you're going to top it up with some water and then the idea is to change the water keeping it cold, we only cook the starches two or three times a day for at least three days, four or five days is probably better, most of our palates today are used to a much less bitter end product, that's pretty much all there is to it starters. This is the next morning on one batch, as you can see the tannins are leaching out into the water and turning it slightly brown, now you could just tip this away down the sink but I don't like wasting water so what I'm going to do is I'm going to decant the water from the straining onto the shells from the acorns and what I want to do is create a tannin rich liquid that I'm going to use in a dye bath, it's not as strong as using ogles and I've talked about those in other videos but ogles aren't always easy to find and you might as well get some benefit out of them that goes a bit further, so I'm going to top this up with water again, it's going to have another soak, we're going for probably four or five days, worth changing the water two or three times a day and we'll see how we get on. I want to try a bit of an experiment with this batch, these acorns in here have been soaking for four days now so they're very nearly ready, probably just about ready but I do want a mild finish, in here is my sourdough we made this right back in the spring by putting some rye grains and water out in a hedge in the garden for 24 hours so they might be wild airborne yeasts, they might have been yeasts that were on the rye grain and it was fed and used quite steadily for several months but when Gareth got poorly it got put in the back of the fridge and actually I don't think we've touched this for a month now, I did stir it, it was looking a bit murky but otherwise it hasn't really had anything done to it for a very long time, I think it's still alive, I want to see if I can use acorn starch to feed a sourdough and get enough yeast action going to try using it to leaven an acorn bread, I have no idea if this is going to work, I've never done it before, so what I'm going to use my my little kitchen quern, my diddly little one that I use for spices, I'm going to fish out just a tablespoon or two, probably a small handful of acorn meat, I'm going to do this in two goes because I'll make a mess otherwise, I'm going to crush it for a bit of work, I want to get this down to a fine, fine paste, really useful, pestle and mortar or the end of a rolling pin in a bowl would work just as well, it's grown in volume as I've mashed it so yeah definitely start with just a few at a time, you can eventually make flour with the acorns that's still soaking, I'll dry them out a little bit first to make this easier and I've always used my bigger quern, but what I'm going to do is I'm going to put this bit of fairly coarse acorn meal in a bowl, I'm going to use my very sad style doro starter, I don't want to use too much because I don't really want my acorn bread in this particular experiment to be too wheat based, I just want to see how much stir that together, I'm going to finish grinding up those little bits as well, probably add a drop of water and I'm going to put this in a warm place for 24 hours and hopefully we'll see it come to life, it might not, these experiments are things that I do because well it amuses me and it keeps me out of mischief, so I'm going to grind this up, I'm going to get this started, I'm going to cover it, put it in the airing cupboard, I'll pull back in 24 hours as to what's going on. While the sourdough is starting off this is the pan of the strainings from the acorn meat and if you remember the meat has most of the tannin in it and we put the shells in and some acorn caps and some odds and ends like that, so it's not going to be the strongest tannin bath, I'd get far more if I was using gauze for example, but it should be enough to put some yarn into and I've got two quite small skeins of wool and in this instance I don't mind if they come out slightly patchy so I'm going to put them in now with the bits and pieces while it's cool and tomorrow I'll give it a good boil and there's two skeins, the plan is to leave one as is, we'll see what colour that comes out, it should be fairly light brown and the other one I'll defy and I'm hoping for a greyish tone, the overall plan is to put these with the conker dyed skeins I did a couple of weeks ago and some others to do a nice hedgerow perhaps a little bit later in the winter. Well sadly, having gone to all that trouble, this particular sourdough experiment didn't work, I think my sourdough starter is dead, no desperandum, it was a good idea, I will revisit it at some point, back to plan A, we'll make the flour and we'll do something completely different. Well it's actually a few days later than planned, things got really busy and this ended up being soaked and with the water being changed all the time for seven days in the end, so they're definitely ready now, all I've done is I've drained them and they're going to go out onto a cloth to dry out and as soon as those have dried I'm going to grind them into flour, shouldn't take too long to be ready. My acorns have dried out now so I need to grind them to flour using a quern but before I do that they're still quite big pieces, I'm just going to give them a very very quick blitz in the whizzer to get them down to a more sensible size. After it came out of the food processor, the acorn meal had the tiniest bit of moisture in it still, so it's been in a dish drying out for half an hour and that feels pretty good now, you want it fairly dry before you grind it, you probably actually could turn it to flour in a food processor but hey, I've got querns in the house, might as well use them. In other videos you've seen me using a saddle quern, in fact my kitchen rock basher is a tiny saddle quern, I'm using a rotary quern today and forgive me but I've lost my tripod so I'm doing all this one-handed as usual. So the inside faces of the stone have grooves in it to help the meal move through the system, this bit is the top I'm going to put it on now, we put some of the acorn meal in the top, now it's going to take a couple of goes, usually the first pass squashes it reasonably well and then I'll gather it all up and put it back through again, but it shouldn't take too long, sometimes I have to go in both directions to get it really today it's working that way around, so the finer meal is starting to come out of the side, so I'm going to put all of this through, then I'm going to gather up the piece of leather that it's sitting on, put it back through again and we should end up with flour at the end of it. That's the first pass done, so you can see this is still quite granular but it's definitely getting finer, another couple of passes will do it. Now one of the reasons why acorns have been eaten since early prehistory is they've got quite a lot of fat and protein as well as carbohydrates and some of the fat has bonded with the moisture and it's getting really quite sticky on here, so I'm going to leave this to dry out for another half hour, I think there's still just a tiny bit more moisture in there that is really helping it grind. As soon as that's dried out, I'll give it another pass or two and my flour will be done. In the meantime, I'm going to go and see how that acorn and tannin dye bath is getting on. So if you remember, the soaking water from the acorns that has the bulk of the tannin in and the shells and some of the husks and the acorn caps have all been put together and into it I've just put a plain woolen yarn, so it hasn't been mordanted, it's just been scoured and put in and given a really good boil. Now I'm not going to get a strong colour, this light beigey colour is about it but I am planning on doing some modifying, so there's two little skeins in here and into the pan next to it I'm going to put a little tiny bit of iron sulphate, so ferrous sulphate, you can use iron water made with rusty nails and a slightly vinegary water as well, you don't need much, there's only something like half a gram in there. Now when I take out one of these skeins, so there's a skein, I shall try and shake out the worst of the acorns, not to worry if I transfer one over, so what I'm going to do is I'm going to put this into the nice hot iron water and I'm hoping we'll get a nice tannin iron reaction. Oh yes, lovely. Now if you've watched my video on making oat galling, it's exactly the same reaction, it's just not quite as dramatic, oat galls have got so much tannin that the iron turns them very, very definite black, this should just give me a very pleasing soft grey, which I think will be very nice indeed. So I'm going to give that another minute or two, then I'll let it cool down, I'll give it a really good wash, you've got to be careful with iron, it's not just things like not drinking the stuff and all the rest of it, too much of it on the wool will destroy it over time, so you only use just as much as you absolutely have to, and my plan is to put these yarns with the ones that I did with the horse chestnut a couple of videos ago, because I'm working up to a batch of yarn all made from local trees for a project, so I should end up with this nice grey, a very, very soft beigey brown, which actually I could over dye with something later if I decide it's too pale to be useful, and then the colours from the horse chestnut, I'll put those all together right at the end of the video so you can see how they've come out, and that second pass, hopefully you can see it's getting finer all the time, I reckon one more pass through, I don't mind a bit of texture in my flour and that will be ready to use. So you might remember from the video on horse chestnuts that these were the dyes I got from the horse chestnut husks, and these are my acorn dyes, so those are going to go fairly well with that, I think this is quite similar to these ones, but a good tannin base I can over dye later, so I might, we'll see how that comes out in probably a few videos time, and here it is, I'll try to make it look artistic for the last minute because you know what, flour is really, really boring to video, this has still got just a little bit of texture to it but that's absolutely fine, I'm not going to make anything with it in this video, I had originally, as I mentioned, planned on experimenting with an acorn sourdough and that just failed, but hey, you know, experiments do sometimes, what I think I'm going to do with this is actually make a classic soda bread, so I'll probably mix half and half with a brown wheat flour and I'll use baking soda to raise it and I'll make a really straightforward soda bread which will take advantage of the nice nutty texture of the acorn flour, but I can wait for another day for the moment, that's pretty much there, so I don't know if you're going to have a go at acorn foraging this year, it's certainly a good year for it, whatever you're up to, happy hedge bothering and I'll see you in the next video.