More salt making

Evaporating salt into darkness

LASER evaporation

Katrina and I made some more salt with our friends Paul and Eli out on Lummi Island. We stayed up into the night to finish and I took some fun photographs.

Long time readers may remember our early methods, which have continued to evolve. When not taking the salt works on the road, we now use our smokehouse/sugar shack/salt shack to keep the rain out of the brine. I am also putting the final touches on a new evaporator for combined maple syrup and salt use. More to come soon!


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Year end foraging reflections

To Native Americans in the Pacific Northwest, winter was traditionally a season rich with feasting, song, dance, storytelling, and reflecting. Little food gathering was required during the dark, wet winters since the diverse landscape provided ample sustenance throughout the preceding seasons. These past years as I have tried to tune my needs to the abilities of the environment to provide, I similarly find myself with little that is new on my foraging to do list and happy to share food and stories during this sodden season. Now with winter here, the Christian holiday of giving fresh in our memories, and a new year upon us, I reflect on my year’s foraging and the meaning of it all.

Never before has my larder been so full. Twelve cases of canned food sit beside my desk, the freezer is stuffed to the gills, and dried goods are overflowing the shelves to fill odd nooks throughout the house. Two years ago, I was happy to say we ate a wild food item every day, but now our diet is more than half wild, and I am beginning to conceive, at least to some degree, what is required to collect a year’s worth of food. The foraging fantasy is becoming palpable and my appetite for it is stronger than ever. For meat we have 50 lbs of frozen, canned, or smoked salmon, and 100 pounds of frozen and canned venison. Our starch supply consists of at least 200 lbs of Wild Rice and 15 pounds of acorns; for fruit we have 5 gallons of huckleberries, 10 gallons of blueberries, 5 gallons of Blue Elderberry juice, 8 gallons of apple sauce, 5 gallons of plums, 2 gallons of Salal, and small amounts of various other fruit leathers, powders, and preserves. Vegetable and oil are not so well represented. Beyond 20 servings of frozen stinging nettle, 6 gallons of green beans, and a dozen pints of canned tomatoes, we rely heavily on the grocery store for veggies, but next year we hope to expand our garden production and I want to experiment with canning wild vegetables, like the stalks of Cow Parsnip. Our wild sugar supply just dried up today, when I rinsed the last drops of our maple syrup into a smoothie, but I just tapped a few Bigleaf Maples and was pleased to see the sap running, so we needn’t starve our syrup cravings for long. What’s more, we’ve enough homemade sea-salt to season our meals, and ample home-brewed cider to wash them down. Surrounded by so much excellent food, every meals has the spirit of thanksgiving as we can’t help but recall with each dish, the landscapes that fed us and the adventures we had while foraging our favorite foods.

The only thing better than eating nature’s bounty, is sharing it. This holiday season we have been blessed with a rich social calendar of family dinners, potlucks, and year-end socials with community organizations. Long gone are the days of grabbing something quick at the grocery store. Last week when a long time member of our local Native Plant Society chapter hosted a Holiday potluck, we shared our Wild Rice, acorn bread with Crabapple Butter, and a wild berry pie. Making the pie really got me thinking about the point of all this harvesting.

When I go to the pantry to put together a meal, it is a journey into a mystical place where space and time are blurred. What is a wild berry pie, but a filling made of hot August sun on lakeside salal and the first September frost on ripe mountain huckleberries, and a crust made of an island oak grove infused with salty October air? Reaching for ingredients is a reflection on the harvest to produce a meal in the fourth dimension: The early Salal was good but the late berries dried up. The Garry Oaks hardly produced this year but the Red Oaks did well. I’ve long believed that the ease with which these details are recalled is evidence that we are specifically designed for the tasks of growing intimate with our environment. This year, however, the lesson has extended even further. In feeding others, I’ve come to see that the stories these foods evoke are perhaps the most natural means of transmitting meaningful ecological information about the land we inhabit. In some societies it is a constant reminder of the importance of stewardship. We hope that in our society—so long divorced from the wild world—that a taste of nature and the story of its path to the plate will at least arouse a curiosity to reconnect.

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"Erica" pie, a bioregional dessert

Here is a regionally inspired recipe for wild berry pie. You can think of it as a huckleberry pie with greater fruit variety and an acorn flour crust. I call it “Erica” pie because Salal and the various huckleberries and blueberries are all in the Heath family, which is known to botanists as Ericaceae.

Acorn Crust (top and bottom for 9” pie)

1.5 cups acorn flour

1.5 cups all-purpose flour

½ teaspoon sea salt

1 cup coconut oil

2/3 cup ice cold water

“Erica” Filling

1 cup Salal (Gaultheria shallon)

1 cup Red Huckleberry (Vaccinium parvifolium)

1 cup Black Huckleberry (V. membranaceum)

1 cup Evergreen Huckleberry (V. ovatum)

1 cup Cascade Blueberry (V. deliciosum)

1/2 cup acorn flour

½ cup maple syrup

1 tablespoon coconut oil

Pinch of salt

Blend acorn flour, all-purpose flour, and salt together and then mix in the coconut oil (or butter) with a pastry knife. Add 1/3 cup water and mix briefly, and then slowly add the additional 1/3 cup water while mixing slowly and deliberately. Stop adding water as soon as all the dough can be clumped into one large ball without falling apart. Cut the ball in half and roll each half into a new ball. Then squish each into a flat disc, wrap in plastic, and refrigerate for 1 to several hours. Roll the bottom crust out on a piece of foil or parchment and place it in a pie pan, trimming the excess with a knife and poking a few fork holes in the bottom of the crust. Mix the berries, flour, syrup, oil, and salt for the filling, and pour into the pie pan. Roll out the top crust and place over the fruit, pinching the top and the bottom crusts together. Cut several slits in the top crust to allow hot air to escape. 

Bake the pie for 1 hour at 350 degrees. Allow the pie to cool for another hour or two before serving.

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Percolation leaching Red Oak acorns

Just a few of these hefty acorns make a handful

It has been several years since I collected Red Oak (Quercus rubra) acorns, and never in the Pacific Northwest. This year they masted heavily near my house and my Garry Oak supply just ran out, so I figured it was time to reconnect with the first acorn I ever ate. Last month I collected 5 gallons of large acorns in just a few hours, and have recently just finished drying and shelling them. This post includes a detailed description of Red Oak along with some ethnobotanical notes, and my experiment with a new (to me) method of leaching acorns.

Red Oak in its native range along the Wisconsin River

Wild Red Oak populations range from Minnesota eastward to Nova Scotia and southward from eastern Oklahoma through most of Alabama, and the northern half of Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina. Two varieties are currently recognized by botanists: Q. rubra var rubra has a more southerly distribution and larger, rounder acorns, and Q rubra var borealis has a more northerly distribution and smaller, more oblong acorns. Though not native to the Pacific Northwest, Red Oak are frequently planted at college campuses, cemeteries, and along streets. They are actually far more common near my house than our native Garry Oak (Quercus garryana).

Brilliant foliage on a fine fall day

Description

In our region, Red Oaks trees generally have straight trunks with spreading to upright branches and a rounded crown. They mature to 60-90 feet tall and can grow 4-6 feet in diameter, but as most of those in the Pacific Northwest are less than 100 years old, trees greater than 3 feet in diameter are rare, despite rapid growth rates.

Red Oak bark

Bark is grey and cracks into relatively smooth plates separated by long, shallow, vertical fissures.

Twigs are reddish brown and smooth. Buds are reddish brown, egg shaped, and ¼ inch long. 

 

The deciduous leaves arise alternately on the branch and range in size from 3-12 (15) inches long and a little more than half as wide. Margins have pointed tips (like all oaks in the red oak group) with 1-5 sharp teeth on each of the 5-9 (usually 7) evenly space lobes with u-shaped troughs that extend a third to half the distance towards the midvein. Leaf bases taper abruptly to a ¾-1.5 inch long petioles. Fall foliage ranges from yellow to scarlet to bronze and some trees will hold dead leaves into the winter. Upper leaf surfaces are smooth and slightly glossy, and lower surfaces are smooth with conspicuous veins that are sometimes hairy.

A lineup of leaves

Red Oak acorns are the quintessential North American acorn with a fairly round shape and shallow saucer to cup shaped cap. Shells range in size from 5/8- 1 1/8 inch wide and 1-1.5 times as long. Shell color ranges from yellowish brown to green to purplish red, and the shells are sometimes covered with very fine silver hairs. Caps only cover 1/3-1/4 of the shell or less, and have a scaly top.

Size gradation of two Red Oak acorn varieties

The US Forest Service Fire Effects database reports that Red Oak acorns contain 1300 calories per pound with roughly 5 percent protein. Kuhnlein and Turner (1991) found 7.2 g of protein, 14.5 g of fat and 65.7 g of carbohydrate per 100 grams of fresh acorn. However, acorns are high in tannins with levels ranging from 4-16 percent.

 

Eaten as a staple food by the Anishinabe (Ojibwa), Dakota, Haudenosaunee (Iroquois), Omaha, Pawnee, Ponca, Potawatomi (see Native American Ethnobotany) and likely all the Indigenous Peoples living within the plants range. The bitter tannins are traditionally leached with the aid of wood ash or lye and cooked into gruel.

Smith's image of edible acorns species

Early ethnobotanist Huron Smith (1923, pg 66) documented the Menominee method of processing various oak species: "The hulls were flailed off after parching, and the acorn was boiled till almost cooked. The water was then thrown away. Then to fresh water, two cups of wood ash were added. The acorns were put into a net and were pulled out of the water after boiling in this. The third time, they were simmered to clear them of lye water. Then they are ground into meal with mortar and pestle, then sifted in a birch-bark sifter. The fourth time, the meal is cooked in soup stock of deer meat until finished and ready to eat, or made into mush with bear oil seasoning. The old Indians never made pie, but the Menomini now make pie of them."

Shelled Red Oak acorns

Processing

Cracked acorns

I’ve written previously about how I dry, crack, and winnow my acorns (see How to Eat an Acorn), but I thought I would pass on another leaching method that Sam Thayer recently told me about called percolation leaching. The technique is modeled after California Native American acorn leaching whereby finely pounded acorn flour is placed on a shallow depression in the sand that is repeatedly filled with water. 

Cracking acorns with a Davebilt Nutcracker

Hupa woman leaching acorns in sand. Photo from Goddard 1903

I have read reports that this technique was capable of leaching tannins from the California acorn species in a matter of hours, but had assumed that such short leaching times had more to do with how the tannins were bound in the California acorns than the leaching method. However, Sam informed me that he was able to leach acorns that normally took the better part of a weak using the decanting method in less than a day with the percolation technique.

My new percolation leaching device

Grinding Red Oak acorns

Percolation leached acorn flour

My first attempt proved equally successful so I constructed my own acorn percolator with a two plastic buckets and a flannel sack. I sliced the bottom off a 2 gallon bucket and cut a hole in the lid of a 5 gallon bucket just large enough for the bottom of the 2 gallon bucket to fit inside. Then I fitted the flannel sack to the lip of the two gallon bucket and filled the sack with acorn flour and water. In the time in took to percolate about 5 gallons of water, I leached half a gallon of acorn flour. There is no going back now. Percolation leaching outperforms decanting hands down.

Drying acorn flour

This new method allows me to leach more acorn flour than I can use immediately, so I have been drying it in a food dehydrator and regrinding the clumps that form to make a soft, very fine flour that is ready to use at a moments notice. Because it is higher in oil than most other flours, I store my acorn flour in the freezer so it doesn't spoil.

Finished Red Oak acorn flour

References

Flora of North America

US Forest Service Fire Effects Information System

Native American Ethnobotany

Smith, Huron 1923. Ethnobotany of the Menomini Indians, Bulletin of the public museum of Milwaukee 4(1):1-174. Photo plates can be seen here.

Dunham, Sean B. 2009. Nuts about Acorns: A Pilot Study on Acorn Use in Woodland Period Subsistence in the Eastern Upper Peninsula of Michigan. The Wisconsin Archeologist 90(1&2):113-130

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