Acorns are plentiful across North America, as they are the seeds of 55 different varieties of oak trees. Come autumn we crunch these round nuts under our feet, often without a second thought about the gnocchi, bread, or muffins we could be making out of them.

On a corner in downtown Martinez, California there's the Hot Dog Depot & Bakery an all American Mom and Pop soda fountain. The proprietor of this restaurant, Sue Chin, came to California from Korea in 1987. She continued the Korean tradition of foraging acorns and using them for starch in favorite dishes like the jelly known as dotori muk which is often eaten with kimchi. She was only using a small part of the acorn for this, so she started making acorn bread.

She explained that while foraging acorns was common in Korea, bread wasn't traditional, "When I was there, we didn't eat bread very much, but it's a little more western now."

She gathers the acorns from a friend's tree in nearby Walnut Creek and peels them and soaks them to get rid of the tannins. She changes the water several times until it runs clean. Then she grinds them in a food processor so they are course, and soaks them some more. When all the bitterness is washed out, she grinds the nuts into a fine powder.
She had her church members taste the early versions and got feedback from them. Through this trial-and-error she came to a recipe that uses half wheat flour and half acorn flour and the result is a light, fluffy semi-sweet dessert bread with a slight edge.

While labor intensive, acorns are an excellent source of fiber, lower in fat than most nuts, and they are excellent for controlling blood sugar levels. Sue's acorn bread is becoming popular around Martinez and it is often served at schools for history day, but she's been getting orders for it as far away as Texas and New York. While she's modest about the attention, when it comes to the process, she shrugs and says, "It's lot of work. I don't know how I do it."

Tip: Acorn Forage

Some acorns are bitter and others have a sweet, milder flavor--white oaks drop the sweetest seeds. You can taste them raw to see if they are the former or latter. Sweet ones won't have to be soaked and rinsed as much, so you might want to harvest from one of these trees to save yourself some steps.

Recipe: Sue Chin's Acorn Bread

Recipe: Sue Chin's Acorn Bread
1 Loaf of Acorn Bread
1 cup acorn flour
1 cup wheat flour
½ tsp. salt
1 tsp. baking soda
1 tblsp baking powder
1 cup buttermilk or plain yogurt
1 egg
½ cup vegetable oil
½ cup raisin
½ cup walnuts

Preheat your oven to 350 degrees,
Sift flours, salt, baking soda and powder together. Mix buttermilk, oil, sugar and egg. Add to dry ingredients, mix and fold in raisins and walnuts.
Bake for 45 minutes until springy and light to touch.