Puffy Acorn Pretzels
My good friend Chef Bob is back and we’ve been having fun creating recipes. Pictured is an acorn pretzel with 3 kinds of wild mustards. On the left is a recipe from Rose Barlow’s website Prodigal Gardens for a wild greens mustard. We used agave nectar in place of maple syrup, and I soaked the mustard seeds in wild mustard flower vinegar. Read this post for making the vinegar. The mustard in the middle is a prickly pear pad combo, and the one on the right is a sweet chokecherry and agave nectar mustard. I tried to get Topanga State Park to let me do a 2-day wild mustard festival as part of the Park’s Land Management strategy, but that didn’t get too far.
Here’s Chef Bob working some of the dough. We made a plain white dough using unbleached white flour, along with the acorn dough, for contrast. Had a lot of fun rolling it out and making wacky designs. Below is my son…eyes closed…who ate this whole braid I made in less than 5 minutes.
Acorn Pretzels
3 ½ c unbleached white flour
½ c acorn flour
1 t sugar
1 package active dry yeast
1 ½ c warm water
1 quart water
coarse salt
Mix 1 ½ cups flour with yeast, sugar, and ½ tsp salt. Add warm water and either beat with mixer or mix by hand. Gradually add remaining flours, then turn onto a floured area to knead. Place kneaded dough into greased bowl, cover, and let rise in warm area for roughly 1 hour. Punch down and turn onto floured area again to roll into long strands. Create your shapes, cover, and let rise for 30 minutes. Boil water, adding some salt, bring it down to a simmer and drop pretzels in water for roughly 20 seconds. Put them onto a well-greased baking sheet and cook 15 minutes in 375° oven. Pull them from the oven ½ way through cooking, and sprinkle on coarse salt.
Great to see chef Bob back! I’m having a 5 minute break from processing 50 kg acorns – actually it’s now only 30, 20 kg were lost in the river where they have been for the last month (our British oak contains a lot of tannin.I have a very liquid oak pulp that I’m processing in three stages: squeezed through fine cotton, then through silk and finally leaving the resulting solids to settle out. Slow but interesting. Can’t think of anything finer than silk as a filter????
Sunny, what happened to the excellent videos?
Fergus x
Fergus, yey! oh the videos…:( I’ve got about 3 half done, but have been super busy so keep not completing them. Heard u were flooding over there. I just got home from Hawaii and about 30#‘s of acorns molded. ^##
am in contract negotiations for a wild food adventure tv show…so we’ll see what happens, but I’ll be in an RV driving to 26 states with my son and a nanny or friend. yeehaw! it’ll post it after i sign the contract. 🙂 anyhoo, hope u r well and enjoying the season.
cheers, ~sunny
oh my god is that really Saelyn? he’s so big now! it seems so long ago that you guys were here! getting a new pc soon so hope to see your videos(the one i’m using is just too slow).
hope you both had a fantastic christmas, and best wishes for the new year!
Flicka!
yey…so good to hear from you. Yes, that’s my boy. Not a great pic, but he’s definitely the light of my life. How’s your new little one? Growing fast I’m sure. Australia does seem like a long time ago, but when I think of eating those wild sea grapes by the sea in Esperence, quangdong’s in South Australia…and chillin with you in the bus….it’s right here. 🙂 All my love to you and your family in 2008!
cheers, ~sunny
Do you make the acorn flour or purchae it?
Hello Jerry,
I make the acorn flour. You can see a brief overview of the processing in this video: http://wildfoodplants.com/processing-acorns
I make bagfulls of flour and then freeze them to use throughout the year. Most of it gets made into acorn flour…although it’s delicious in quickbreads/pancakes/stews/etc.
cheers, ~sunny
Enjoyed the acorn video. I, too, harvest acorns each year. I get some that are sweet acorns, meaning no rinsing necessary-so much easier! Some of the trees here need the leaching, though, so I do have a long processing for a good harvest.Never used the shells for medicine before. I do make green hull tincture from black walnuts for fungal and vermifuge use.Hope to see more from you-good gathering!