North America · Volume 29, Salmon, Cedar and the Acorn World
Acorn Soup (xuun)
Klamath-Trinity region, Karuk territory, USA
Illustration
- Researched
- Researched from 216 sources in the brief
As tradition built it
Acorn Soup (xuun)
Karuk
Ingredients
- 7½lb shelled nutmeats (from a 5 gallon bucket of unshelled acorns) dried, shelled acorns
- to cover water, for leaching and cooking
- as available fire-heated stones
Method
- Pound dried, shelled acorns, traditionally in a stone mortar with a stone pestle, into a coarse meal.
- Refine the meal by sifting through progressively finer, tightly woven baskets.
- Leach the meal, spread in a shallow sand basin or a tightly woven basket, pouring water over it and letting it filter through repeatedly to carry the bitter, tannic acid away; timing varies from under a day with continuous sand percolation to as long as three days for meal tethered in a flowing stream.
- Taste the leaching water periodically and stop once it tastes sweet or nearly so; many Native cooks, as Sara Calvosa Olson (Karuk) describes, deliberately stop earlier to preserve some of the acorn's own character rather than leach it out entirely.
- Cook the leached meal into soup by dropping fire-heated stones directly into a watertight woven basket of meal and water, stirring continuously with a wooden paddle so the stones do not scorch through the basket wall, swapping each cooled stone for a fresh hot one until the soup reaches a rolling boil.
What a modern chef changes
A controlled chinois leach, following Olson's own lead
Rungs 5 and 6: Acorn leaching, basket cooking with hot stones
Method
- Sara Calvosa Olson's own published, documented contemporary practice, extending acorn into acorn milk, acorn crepes and acorn miso made by inoculating leached acorn with koji, is the strongest available basis for restraint rather than invention here.
- Following her lead rather than improvising past it, leach the meal in cold water through a fine chinois over 24 to 48 hours, monitoring and tasting at intervals exactly as Olson describes.
- This gives a British kitchen without running-stream access the same tasted-to-sweetness control without guesswork, and nothing more elaborate than that.