Learn about seed flours for baking recipes, including how to make sunflower seed flour, pumpkin seed flour nutrition, and how to cook acorns.
I’ve gardened for most of my life and foraged for food and herbs for many years. One of the many lessons I’ve learned over the years is that nature’s offerings are abundant. Whether this is a glut of zucchini or a mast year for acorns, I often find myself with more food in my basket than I bargained for. This bounty provides many opportunities; I can preserve much of the harvest to enjoy later in the season, or I can share this abundance with friends and neighbors.
A large harvest also gives me the chance to experiment with new ways to process and work with these foods. Over the years, I’ve learned many ways to prepare these plants, from pressing their seeds for oil to infusing flowers in cream for buttermilk frosting. When it comes to transforming my harvest into edible delights, the possibilities are endless.
Let’s explore homegrown and foraged alternative flours. These come from plants from your gardens or surrounding habitat that can be dried, ground in a spice grinder or food processor, and enjoyed in many of the same ways we might use wheat – in cookies, cakes, artisan breads, and crackers. One of the only limits is your imagination. Another is that these alternative flours don’t contain gluten, so while they can’t be used as a 1-to-1 substitute in traditional baking recipes, they can be included in smaller amounts, adding unique flavors and textures to your creations.
How to Make Sunflower Seed Flour
A small patch of sunflowers (Helianthus annuus) can produce copious amounts of edible seeds. The seeds can be eaten as snacks, pressed for their decadent oil, or ground to create a flavorful and nutritious flour. The challenge of working with homegrown sunflowers is shelling the seeds, which can be a slow, laborious task, especially if you’re shelling lots of seeds. One of the quickest ways to shell sunflower seeds is to crack them open using a rolling pin. Lay the seeds out in a single layer and firmly roll the pin over top to crack the shells apart. Then, remove the broken shells by winnowing. Use a handheld blow-dryer to lift the chaff away, or pour the entire mess in front of a fan, letting the lighter shells blow away.
Alternatively, already-shelled sunflower seeds are readily available in bulk through reputable suppliers. This is a great option if you don’t have time to shell sunflower seeds but still want to enjoy them in your recipes.
Sunflower Seed Cornbread Recipe
Sunflower seeds can be ground into a flour using a spice or coffee grinder. In my book Herbs in Every Season, we used sunflower seeds to create a tasty cornbread. For that recipe, we included home-pressed sunflower oil and decorated the bread with flower petals, but you can make a basic cornbread recipe, substituting ground seeds for some of the flour. That recipe, excerpted below, calls for equal parts all-purpose flour, cornmeal, and ground sunflower seeds. Yield: 4 to 6 servings.
Ingredients
- 3/4 cup all-purpose flour
- 3/4 cup cornmeal
- 3/4 cup ground sunflower seeds
- 1/4 cup whole sunflower seeds
- 2 tablespoons sugar
- 2-1/2 teaspoons baking powder
- 3/4 teaspoon salt
- 1 tablespoon butter
- 2 eggs, beaten
- 1 cup milk
- 1/4 cup sunflower seed oil
- Handful of fresh sunflower petals, lightly tossed in oil
- Combine dry ingredients in a bowl.
- Add butter to cast-iron skillet and place in 400 F oven until butter melts, then remove and swirl pan to evenly coat all sides with butter.
- In a small bowl, combine eggs, milk, and sunflower seed oil.
- Add wet ingredients to dry ones and stir until just combined.
- Pour into hot skillet and decorate top of batter with sunflower petals.
- Bake 15 to 20 minutes.
Pumpkin Seed Flour Nutrition
Another great option for a garden-grown alternative flour is pumpkin seeds (Cucurbita pepo var. pepo). These seeds are nutrient-rich and offer a delightful nutty flavor to your culinary creations. They can easily be scooped out of the fruits and then washed, dried, and ground. If you’re harvesting seeds from multiple fruits, just scrape the seeds from the pumpkin and collect them in a large bucket. Fill the bucket with water and let them rest for a few hours. This is a hands-off way to remove the clingy bits of squash and clean the seeds. After some time, the seeds will separate from the fruit material and drop to the bottom of the bucket. Strain them out and let them dry.
The seeds can be quickly dried in a low-temperature oven or a food dehydrator. Much like sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds are oily. They’re best ground in a coffee or spice grinder. Trying to grind them in a food processor might result in an accidental nut butter – a delicious mistake.
We press pumpkin-seed oil here at Small House Farm and use the leftover seedcake in several recipes. One of our favorites is pumpkin-seed pancakes! Don’t worry, though; you don’t need to press oil to enjoy these flavorful flapjacks. Just grind your seeds and include them in the recipe. You can use any standard pancake recipe; just substitute 1/4 to 1/3 of the flour with ground pumpkin seeds.
How to Cook Acorns
Even amateur foragers can quickly identify and collect dropped acorns (Quercus spp.). Double-check that the shells don’t have any obvious cracks or holes in them. To be sure your harvest is insect-free, drop the acorns into a bucket of water. The good ones will sink, so discard any floaters. Then, use a food dehydrator overnight to fully dry the acorns. Once dried, store them in buckets until you’re ready to use them. When it’s time, use a standard nutcracker or hammer to remove the shells and separate the nuts. Try your best to also remove the brown skin that’s attached to the nuts.
Acorns are high in tannins, which will need to be leached out. First, grind your dried acorns into a flour using a food processor and a bit of water, which will help grind the nuts into a smooth consistency. Transfer the slurry into a large container and cover with cold water. Store the container in the refrigerator. Every day, carefully pour off the old water and replace it with fresh water. The weight of the acorn flour will keep it at the bottom of the container when you gently pour off the water, but you could use a cheesecloth over the top of the container if you’re worried about losing some of the flour. Replace the water daily for anywhere from 4 to 7 days. Each day, taste the acorns: They’re ready when they’re no longer bitter. Pour the mixture through a cheesecloth to capture the acorn flour. Use a food dehydrator on its lowest setting to fully dry the flour, restoring it to a powdered form.
Acorn flour can quickly go rancid, so use it right away or store it in the freezer. Mix it 50-50 with wheat flour and make luxurious homemade pasta. Homemade pasta is easy to make with only two ingredients: the flour of your choice and eggs. Weigh 300 grams of your flour mix and combine it with 185 grams of eggs. Mix and knead until the mixture forms into a dough ball.
Much like acorns, walnuts can be shelled, dried, and ground into a useful flour. You can use commercial English walnuts (Juglans regia), foraged black walnuts (J. nigra), almonds (Prunus dulcis), hazelnuts (Corylus avellana), or pecans (Carya illinoinensis) to create your own flours. Give any readily available nuts a try and unlock new flavor profiles for your baked goods.
The most challenging aspect of creating flours from tree nuts is the process of cracking and removing the shells. By hand, this is usually more work than it might be worth.
One trick is to use a bucket of cold water to help separate the nuts from their shells. Crack open the nuts with a hammer, a nutcracker, or any heavy object. Don’t worry about crushing the nut – just smash it open. Then, toss everything into a bucket of cold water. The nuts are denser than the shells, so the nuts will sink to the bottom of the bucket while everything else will float. Skim off all the shells and bits of skin, then pour the contents of the bucket through a cheesecloth, colander, or another type of screen to catch the nuts. Set your oven or food dehydrator to the lowest temperature, dry the nuts, and then grind your flour.
Red Clover
You can also look to the wild plants in your yard for interesting alternative flour options. Red clover (Trifolium pratense) grows abundantly in my backyard, and the pretty purple flowers can be made into a sweet, slightly nutty flour. Just gather the flowers by hand as they bloom and allow them to fully dry, either by laying them out on screens or by using your dehydrator. If the weather is humid, use a fan blowing nearby whenever you’re drying herbs on screens. This will help them dry quickly while maintaining their color and flavor. Once the flowers are fully dried, grind them into a powder using your food processor.
Red Clover Cookie Recipe
For Herbs in Every Season, I developed a fun cookie recipe with red clover flour, excerpted below. Since the flour is gluten-free, I could only substitute about a sixth of the wheat flour to be sure the cookies still had a good texture and consistency. I really wanted the red clover to be the star of the recipe, so I added some freshly harvested, finely chopped flowers to the mix. This added a bright sweetness to the cookies. Yield: 1 dozen cookies.
Ingredients
- 1 cup butter at room temperature
- 1 cup honey (local raw honey if possible)
- 1 large egg
- 1-1/2 cups all-purpose flour
- 1/2 cup red clover flour
- 1 teaspoon baking powder
- 1/2 cup red clover flowers (freshly harvested, finely chopped)
- Preheat oven to 325 F. In a bowl, mix butter and honey until smooth, and then add egg and mix thoroughly until well-blended.
- In a separate bowl, combine flour, baking powder, and red clover flowers. Mix well.
- Slowly stir dry ingredients into the wet ones, until completely mixed.
- Drop dough by the spoonful onto a baking sheet and bake for about 10 minutes or until the bottom edges of your cookies are golden-brown.
- Allow the cookies to cool and then enjoy with a cup of hot herbal tea.
Curly Dock
Another common garden “weed” is curly dock (Rumex crispus). This hardy perennial can be a challenge to remove from places where we’d prefer it wasn’t growing. It’s a member of the buckwheat family, and it has seeds that can be collected, dried, and – you guessed it – ground into flour.
The seeds are ready to be harvested in late summer. When fully mature, they’ll become a deep, rusty-brown color inside of a papery husk. Feel free to leave the seeds within the husks; the papery shells are also edible. To improve the flavor of the seeds, lightly roast them in the oven before grinding. Lay your freshly harvested dock seeds out on a baking sheet and toast in a 350 F oven for 5 to 10 minutes, until aromatic. Let the seeds cool, then grind them into flour in your spice grinder.
Curly Dock Cracker Recipe
Years ago, when we were vendors at a local farmers market, one of our customers shared some unique homemade crackers with us. They were made using flax seeds and pickle juice. Here’s a variation of her recipe, substituting the flax for homemade dock seed flour. Yield: about a dozen crackers.
Ingredients
- 1/2 cup dock seed flour
- 1/2 cup all-purpose flour
- 1/3 cup pickle juice
- 2 tablespoons olive oil or melted butter
- Combine all ingredients in a medium bowl and mix until a stiff dough forms. Let the dough rest for 10 to 15 minutes.
- Place the dough between two sheets of parchment paper and roll it out very thin. Transfer dough onto a baking sheet. Using a fork, prick some holes into the dough to prevent puffing.
- Bake for 12 to 15 minutes. Carefully transfer onto a wire rack to cool, then break into crackers and enjoy.
Bevin Cohen is an author, herbalist, and co-founder of Small House Farm in Michigan. He has spent most of his life studying the many uses of plants and continues to be inspired by the wonders of nature. He has written nearly a dozen books on herbs, gardening, and local food, including The Complete Guide to Seed and Nut Oils and Herbs in Every Season.
Originally published in the October/November 2026 issue of MOTHER EARTH NEWS and regularly vetted for accuracy.
