Acorn Apple Pâté
By Jed Wheeler of Manzanita Cooperative
Unlike Bay Nut or domesticated nuts, acorn has very little fat and will not grind into butter the way peanut or almond will. It is possible to produce a raw acorn butter through grinding if you add oil to it. This recipe, however, takes a different route, creating a smooth creamy spread similar to a Pâté by developing the starches. The result is both sweet and savory, and delicious on fresh bread or with crackers. My family enjoys it at breakfast and it’s a big hit at parties.
This recipe is loosely based on the recipe for “Newtella” developed by Peter Becker in Germany. While his original site is gone, it is referenced on several blog posts and I was able to reconstruct it from that. Peter used sprouted acorns for his recipe, claiming that sprouting them made the acorns sweeter and converted some of the starches to sugar. This process is essentially identical to the malting process used for beer.
In Peter’s original recipe, he used hot-leached acorn, but leaching with boiling water cooks the starch and so that starch is not available to help thicken the butter. In my experiments I have found that cold leached acorn produces a much better Pâté as the starch thickens it and adds natural creaminess to the finished product. I have also added pine nuts to the recipe because I love them and the added fat improves the mouth feel.
Ingredients:
2 cups cold leached acorn
1/2 cup pine nuts
6 cups apple juice
1.5 cup sugar or 1 cup honey (adjust this to taste)
2 tsp Pectin (may need to be adjusted depending on your local acorn species)
Process:
Roughly grind or smash the acorn and pine nut
In a saucepan, combine acorn and apple juice. Simmer at low heat until volume reduces by 50%, stirring occasionally.
Add sugar or honey and pectin, stir thoroughly
Simmer until mixture begins to thicken and then remove from heat and let cool.
Serve with fresh bread or crackers
