Acorn preparation the easy way

In a recent Facebook post asking about tips for achieving more self-sufficiency, I responded that my recent return to an interest in acorns had led to discoveries which theoretically make us 100% self-sufficient for food if we care to be. Then I was asked 

to which I responded:

"Our acorns are quite low in tannins as I mentioned, so depending on what you're working with changes may be needed. I am having trouble sourcing bitter acorns here, so there it's more theory than verified practice.

"Completely forget all those stupid hot water (boiling methods). Forget the streams and toilet tank BS for the cold extraction methods.

"1. Shell acorns. The fastest method for this is roasting, but if you want to avoid that 

"(a1) dry for a while or in a desiccator and

"(b1) Cut lengthwise (wear butcher's gloves and use a narrow, long knife, employing the tip end as a fulcrum) and pry out the nut - a grapefruit spoon is the best aid I've found for difficult cases, and its serrations can be useful for scraping off bad bits

"OR, for roasting

"(a2) cut a lengthwise slit in the acorns, drop into water to soak for some hours (I sometimes use a modified olive slitting tube with two cutting vanes removed) and

"(b2) roast in a cast-iron pan over a campfire or in a fireplace for that nice smoked tang or roast for maybe 15-30 minutes in the oven at 230 degrees C or so; the roast is done when the slits open wide, some so much so that the nuts just fall out. Don't worry if the acorns become very dark, even black - they are carmelized, not burned usually - yum!

"2. Then taste the acorns, and if bitter, drop into water in a 1 gallon plastic water bottle or other container; soak and change water every half day or day, tasting each time until you feel that the debittering is completed to your satisfaction.

"3. Take the nuts, dry them briefly and grind them in blender, using a sieve/screen to sift the fine flour from the grits, the latter being a good form to roast as an ersatz coffee. Use fresh/moist within a week or so, dry it for longer storage at ambient temperature or freeze it for use months or years later (depending on your freezer conditions)...."

For the roasting method, that 1a2 step is very important! Acorns with a lot of moisture inside can burst explosively if there is nothing - like a cut in the nut - to allow steam to escape. And the uncut ones that don't burst often have their texture and taste ruined by excessive steaming inside the intact shell. With a cut, the shells will split wider and dry, so that acorn meats often simply fall out intact.

The first time I tried to roast acorns without cutting the shells was quite dramatic. Gaia, our Fila de São Miguel (like a Portuguese pit bull) is a terrifying dog who longs to hear the words Mate todos! ("kill them all") when I let her outside, but she was the terrified one with the shells bursting loudly inside our flimsy toaster oven. The trembling beast had to be sent outside to go hide in a kennel, and she did not ask to come back in that night. Harmat, my Wire-haired Viszla from a great breeder in hunting Hungary, just wanted to know where she could retrieve the shot birds.

In the meantime, I can get a couple kilograms of flour from acorns swept off the ground and processed fresh in about an hour, to make roasted nuts, crackers, dark breads of every kind, rich nut cheeses, meatless balls, delicious ersatz coffees and tea and more. A journalist friend recently blogged about John Lennon, who has been dead now about as long as he walked the earth, and I responded:

"... woke at 5 am, put on my robe and gathered acorns from the terrace as it rained, and as I washed and slit the fresh nuts to prepare for roasting in the fireplace, to open them up, make them easy to shell and convert to acorn flour, the main part of our breads and other dishes for a few weeks now, I found myself singing "Imagine" quietly as I pictured industrialized monoculture fields of wheat gone from our landscapes, replaced by groves of oaks in guild permacultures, once again giving renewable wood for fuel, crafts and construction, cork bark to keep us warm in insulated walls and to hold our fruit harvest wines in their flasks, and producing their regular crops of acorn grains above, squashes and hops (for acorn beer) climbing those trees and the understories of lesser trees, fruit bushes, herbs and fiber plants spread below and between them, asparagus close in and peeking through shrub twigs, truffles below the earth, and the sounds of a thousand birds at every level of branches and across the ground. Imagine that. It's easy if you try."

Tosta de tomate

One of the conveniences of living in a Portuguese border town is that what we can't find here is probably to be had with a ten-minute drive across the border to Badajoz, Spain.

One of those things is apparently tomato toast. One morning the doutora announced that we were going for a drive and would have breakfast in Spain. I was quietly horrified at the idea, because Portuguese friends have often told me how terrible Spanish food is, and my few experiences up to that point had done little to contradict their opinions.

And when we took the freeway exit to what I would probably call a truck stop, I was dubiously curious about what was to come. Just tosta, she said as we approached the cafeteria counter, and café.

Hmm. I thought as I watched the help slop olive oil over a bit of white bread toast. Very dubious. We were given a plastic squeeze bottle with some orange crap in it, which turned out to be pureed tomato. At the table, I was instructed to spread the goop onto the olive oil-soaked toast and then add just a sprinle of salt. Given that we almost never cook with salt, I was really skeptical now.

It was love at first bite. My God.

Since then we've improved on that first delicious experience; now the tomatoes come fresh from the garden sometimes, and the bread for toasting is usually some sort of a spelt-and-rye sourdough or some other whole grain mix. And we use a better salt, collected from evaporation beds by the seaside. The olive oil too is a few classes better - Portugal has the best in the world, after all. Heaven can get better.

But that's usually the Portuguese way: go out and find something great somewhere in the world, maybe just a little way across the border. And make it better.

Cabbage tourism in Trás-os-Montes

On the first morning after our arrival in Negrões, the doutora returned from a quick shopping run to Montalegre and exclaimed that she was very frustrated. Not, alas, the kind of frustration that promised a mutually satisfying resolution of the difficulty. The horror, the horror, she exclaimed as she described all the beautiful cabbages she had seen on the trip and her great disgust at discovering that none of these tasty varieties were to be had at the market she found.

You would not believe how magnificent they were! And everywhere! she exclaimed as she confessed to felonious thoughts of first-degree cabbage theft, thwarted by the watchful eye of an old man with a particularly delicious patch of galegas and pencas. I knew she meant what she said, thinking back on our week in Minho and the likelihood that the local correio still had wanted posters up after her binge making caldo verde there.

Couves galegas to tempt passersby

There is an amazing variety of cabbages in Portugal, used in many varied and specific ways, all very confusing for the newcomer. Rochelle Ramos, a native of the US Pacific Northwest now living in Portugal's Ribatejo region, wrote a nice introduction to Portuguese cabbage and greens cookery which is a good place to start getting a grip on these delicious greens. But the grelos, couve-galega, couve-lombarda &alia she discusses are just a quick flash of light reflected from this jeweled trove of national culinary treasure.

The jewels in the crown: Couve Penca de Chaves

Walk into a local hardware store in Montalegre or Chaves, and you'll find packets of seed for at least eight or nine varieties, many of them local vegetables that I have not seen offered in Alentejo. And when you think you've seen them all, the next shop will have another kind you haven't seen before.

There will be a few newcomers in next year's garden.

Ramos describes cabbage and other greens as the epitome of peasant fare in Portugal, but for those with a taste for rich, healthy flavors and no pretense, they are a good main course on any plate.

A big plate of turnip greens dressed in olive oil and vinager with a mixed rice featuring alheira de Montalegre,
feijão frade, tomato and spices of Spain and India, all accompanied by a good local white wine.

Good, simple food, solid as the granite from which most of the regional houses and barns are built. Gourmet fare for Everyman.

Home between the cabbage patches in Negrões, with the ancient reservoir behind

A cabbage patch with a view in Negrões

Olives for all

My first visit to Évora was also my first encounter with fresh, locally produced pickled olives. Although I would occasionally buy Kalamata olives or various stuffed ones from Turkish merchants in Germany, I was never particularly fond of the fruit, and I found most of the lye-processed olives served in restaurants or sold in shops to be inedible. So the crisp, herb accents of fresh olives of various sizes and colors served to me in a small Eborenese restaurant were a revelation.

An old olive tree in Tavira

In my second year of residence in Portugal, I moved to a small quinta in Louredo, about 7 kilometers from the walls of Évora. There were about a dozen old olive trees on the property, and I got it into my head to see if I could use the fruit in some way. Making oil was out of the question; the nearest lagar for processing was about 40 kilometers away, and the complexities of re-registering cars from other EU countries in Portugal had left me without transportation. So pickling olives was the only choice remaining I thought.

Romans enjoyed the fruits of harvest from this 2000-year old tree!

A bit of online research turned up a lot of advice on how to preserve olives at home; the best I found was from the University of California Extension in Davis. Their 26-page guide offered advice on how to handle olives of various kinds in every stage of ripeness and drew on interesting traditions from across the Mediterranean and beyond. I skipped the methods using lye, because I had enough of ruined shirts from that in my laboratory days, and I've tried quite a number of water- and brine-curing methods. My latest variation is olives preserved by packing and drying them in salt, a method favored in Greece.

Greek-style, dry salt-cured olives in progress

My first batches of olives extracted in water for a few weeks, then preserved in brine with spices, were delicious and generally well received by Portuguese friends, except for a few odd batches where I got too creative and tried out "Christmas spicing". Those were a little strange. But the process on the whole is quite simple, particularly after I ignored all the nonsense in the guide about buckets of water and weighting down the olives with plates and simply recycled one- to two-liter beverage bottles as my water extraction vessels. Change the water daily - quite simple in the kitchen sink - and then just cut the tops off of the bottles when the olives are debittered to the point you want them.

Another simplification of processing for me was a the discovery of a special tool for cutting olives. Many water-extraction methods require a few cuts to be made in the olives to facilitate the extraction of oleuropein, the bitter agent in the fruit.

But years of using keyboards and vibrating power tools have caused considerable nerve damage to my hands, so that a few minutes of cutting fruit with a knife lead to excruciating pain. But the end justified the pain I thought. Then, as I was preparing my third annual lot of olives in the kitchen, the doutora asked why I didn't just use an olive cutter, because that would be easier on my hands. A what? I asked.

Indeed. This sped up processing enormously, reduced the mess and almost eliminated the pain. And all the time I could have had one from a local drogeria for a few euros.

This year I started so many pickled olives that I had to take some liters of them along on holiday and finish them off to take home afterward.

The doutora is less fond of traditional olives than I am, and when she saw recently that I had raided a few more kilos from an abandoned orchard near my office, she wrinkled her nose and asked why I didn't make sweet olives instead. What are those? I responded. Some years ago in Greece she had bought a jar of sweet olives and rather liked them, but she had been unable to find anything like that since then, because there is no such thing in traditional Portuguese food culture.

Nor in any other culture with a description of the process in a language I can read. A few recipes using brined olives to make unusual bar treats in California, but nothing for making a sweet preserve from raw olives. So I turned to a Greek colleague, who supplied me with a Greek description off the Internet of how to make sweet olives and sweet olive jam.

I published my initial adaptation of the process on Translation Tribulations, but since then I have discovered that the days of water extraction for the olives can be skipped. Sweet olives made with fresh, black-ripe olives had only a slight trace of bitterness; looking at the chemical structure of oleuropein, it seems not unlikely that a total of forty minutes boiling time oxidizes that substance, reducing or eliminating the bitterness of the fruit.

Sweet olives on fresh sheep cheese for breakfast

Reactions to the sweet olives here in Portugal are mixed - some love the taste and the novelty, others hate the break with local tradition. But given the country's history of bringing back the treasures of the world and making them uniquely local, I suspect that there may be a future for azeitonas doces here in Portugal. In my private Portugal at least.