When it’s time to process acorns, Mark Ressl sends out a text. Everyone shows up. We spend Sundays at the house he shares with Sage Jobsis, sitting around the kitchen table, chatting and cracking acorns with lemon squeezers. My three-year-old heads off into the living room, which is full of handmade leather drums tanned in acorn water.
We snack on cheese and crackers, homemade kombucha, and whatever acorn baking experiments I’ve brought: acorn butter cookies, acorn maple donuts, acorn cream puffs, or malted acorn black bread. Dense in nutrients, and offering a nutty, almost gingerbread like flavor, acorn flour can be a baker’s best friend. By evening, upwards of a thousand acorns have been cracked and are ready for the next step of the flour-making process.
Acorn flour making is famously labor-intensive. It requires gathering, shelling, and grinding them to fine rubble, leaching out the bitter tannins, and then grinding again into a mahogany powder that can be used in a similar fashion to other gluten-free flours like buckwheat. Still, it’s work that can be done by hand without the expensive machinery required for commercial grain harvesting and processing.
For Ressl and Jobsis, the work fits the local scale at which they operate their organization, The Giving Trees. Acorn flour isn’t exactly their business, but something they give away for free to people who buy native food-bearing trees or donate to have trees planted in the Hudson Valley.
“I’m afraid that the beautiful places that can support human and animal life can be turned into suburbs if we don’t have a lens of recognizing the value of these species,” says Ressl. “The only reason that we can gather so many acorns each fall,” he explains, “is that 50 or 100 years ago someone decided not to cut down the oak trees for wood or for space.”
He wants that to still be possible 50 or 100 years from now.
“Humans related to the land by taking care of trees for all of human history, but we’ve very much stepped away from that. [I want to create] fun on-ramps for people to re-relate to them.”
“The trees are in our community,” says Jobsis. “The acorns are in our community. We don’t have to own a farm; we don’t have to own specialized equipment. We don’t have to scale up. We can be at home with a small circle of friends and make acorn flour.”
THE GIVING TREES
Rosendale | givingtrees.org
