Acorn Jelly

As mentioned in the second volume of the AAFC magazine, acorn jelly, also known as dotori muk, is a Korean dish that essentially makes a smooth jelly out of acorn meal. Today, people can avoid the laborious task of collecting and preparing the acorns and instead buy acorn starch from a grocery store. But, historically, many people with access to a large enough source of acorns, such as the Indigenous people of North America, figured out how to utilize this unlikely food source. After collecting the nuts and shelling them, a necessary step is grinding the acorns into a flour and soaking it in water to leach out the toxins. Then, this was often used as a kind of oatmeal or baked into breads. Acorn jelly requires another step to further refine the acorns from a meal consistency to a flour consistency, to make its silky firm texture. Dotori muk is said to have originated in the mountain regions of Korea, where there were ample oak trees for acorns to be a reliable source of sustenance. I found the various forms of preparation to be interesting, as it speaks to the various ways different people approach the same food source.

Lee, Debbie. “What the Squirrels Know: Acorns for Dinner.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 8 Oct. 2010, www.nytimes.com/2010/10/13/dining/13acorn.html.