Sign in Subscribe

Acorn progress, notepads in the shop

Acorn progress, notepads in the shop

Hey all, hope you're enjoying the good fall weather we've been having. Here's what we've been up to this week:

Acorns

A Victoria-brand hand crank flour mill

We had our second week of acorn processing down at the market, and our first week of adding the course grinding step to the workflow. This is something we do before the leaching step to make it easier to get all the tannins out.

Two yogurt cups filled with dark brown roasted acorn nutmeats

The acorns we've been working with this year are about the size of peanuts, and that means they don't have much surface area relative to their volume. The two big factors for effective leaching are water flow and surface area. Unfortunately, you can't optimize both of those things at once. Big acorn chunks let lots of water flow through the cracks between them, but they don't have much surface area. Acorn flour has lots of surface area, but it turns into one big glob of mush if you try to soak it in water.

Three bags of coarsely ground acorns
(Incidentally, we use Montague Foods cookie bags for all sorts of projects, so if you're a fellow Montague Foods cookie fan, please bring us your bags!

To try to get the best balance between surface area and water flow, we send the acorns through the flour mill at the coarsest possible setting, and then sift the result by size. When you have a mix of sizes, the small bits tend fill in the spaces between the big bits, and no water gets through. Luckily, this gives me a chance to bring out one of my favorite tools: my green stacking sieves.

Using the stacking sieves, I was able to sift all the crushed acorns from Saturday (about 4kg) in about 15 minutes.

Four bowls of acorn bits of different sizes

The smallest bits I set aside for a hot-leached-maple-acorn-pudding idea I've been wanting to try. (My attempts to cold-leach them in previous years turned into slimy fermenting messes because of insufficient water flow.) The larger three sizes got bagged up in some cheesecloth bags I made during my first acorn season and placed into buckets to leach.

Two five gallon buckets of water containing cheesecloth bags of acorn bits. The water is darkening from the tannins coming out of the acorns

I'll be changing the water in these buckets a couple of times a day for most of the rest of this week. Once the water stops turning brown, I'll know that the tannins are gone, and I'll dry the acorns in the oven so that we can get our first batch of finished flour next Saturday.

Contest Announcement

There is an orange background and a large picture of an acorn. Text reads: Commoners Contest - Big Acorns for Bold Art - Montague Artisan Market - Saturdays: 9am-2pm

When it comes to making acorn flour in any real quantity, it helps to start with nice big acorns. It takes about the same amount of work to shell a tiny Pin Oak nut as it does to shell a huge chonker of a Northern Red Oak nut. I know a few trees around town that produce larger-than-average acorns, but I bet there are plenty more out there I haven't found. To that end, we're launching a contest we're calling Big Acorns for Bold Art.

(I wanted to call it "Who's Got the Biggest Nuts In Town?" but our communications director nixed the idea 🙈)

The prizes:

  • 1st place: your choice of one of our new Commoners' Notepads, or a one hour token
  • All participants: a 15 minute token, in recognition of the time they took to enter

How to enter:

  • Find the tree in your neighborhood that's dropping the biggest acorns. (That might mean asking your neighbor if you can gather from their yard.)
  • Collect at least 10 of the biggest acorns you can find. Put them in a paper bag marked with your name, contact info, and where you found them.
  • Bring them to our booth at the Artisan Market on Saturdays from 9am-2pm.

We'll be announcing the winner after Pumpkinfest on October 11th.

Notepads

A set of 11 handmade notepads. 5 of them are elaborately handpainted, while six have simple gradient patterns

The first batch of notepads is now available in the shop! The price works out to one hour for the plainer gradient covers, and two hours for the handpainted ones. There will (hopefully) be 4 batches total: this grey one, a red one, a blue one, and a purple one. Each batch will include 6 plain gradients and 6 handpainted ones. We'll also eventually have a small batch of entirely unpainted ones available for half an hour each, although those might not have the same long term durability as the ones protected by paint and varnish.

I'm really happy with how these came out. I've been using mine every day, and it's made it a thousand times easier to keep track of the data I've been gathering about the acorns this year. It feels satisfyingly durable in my hand, and I know I'll be using it for years to come. In these times when it feels like everything's been going to trash, it feels good to be able to turn trash into something beautiful 🎨

I'm going to cut it off there for the week, because I promised myself that I was going to get this out before the end of the workday today. I have an essay in progress that was originally supposed to go here, but it's getting more elaborate and I've started making charts, so it's not going to be ready by the deadline. Good luck hunting for acorns this week! Here's this week's nails:

Wiley's nails for this week have a turquoise holographic background with silver flakes in it, with a yellow holographic stripe down the center and black dots on top of that.