Bush Tucker: A Guide to Australian Native Ingredients

Australian Christmas has a small problem it doesn't like to talk about.

The food is northern hemisphere food. Roast everything, heavy gravy, a hot pudding, a table designed for a house where it's dark at four in the afternoon and snowing outside. We eat it in thirty-five degree heat with the back door open and a fan going, and then we all have a lie down.

There's nothing wrong with the tradition. But there's a whole pantry of ingredients that grew here, suit the weather, and taste like the place we actually live. Most Australians couldn't name five of them, which is a strange thing given some have been eaten here for tens of thousands of years.

Here's what they are, what they taste like, and what to do with them.

First, a word on where this food comes from

These are Aboriginal foods. Lemon myrtle, Davidson plum, bunya nut, finger lime and the rest were gathered, traded, cultivated and cooked by Aboriginal people for tens of thousands of years before anyone thought to put them on a restaurant menu. We acknowledge the indigenous people, the custodians of the lands that produce these foods, and the knowledge they share with us. 

The bunya harvest is the clearest example. Every few years, when the bunya pines fruited heavily in south-east Queensland, people travelled from hundreds of kilometres away to gather, eat and settle business together. That's not a piece of colour to decorate an article with, it's a food system with real logistics and real depth behind it.

We'll say that plainly, once, and then get on with the food. But it's worth knowing whose knowledge this is.

What is bush tucker?

"Bush tucker" is the everyday Australian term for native foods, the plants, fruits, seeds, nuts and animals that grow here naturally. It covers an enormous range, from things you'd recognise on a supermarket shelf to things you'd walk past on a bushwalk without a second look.

Cooks tend to use a much smaller working set, maybe a dozen ingredients that are available, reliable, and do something specific to a dish. Those are the ones below.

A useful thing to understand before you start: most native ingredients are concentrated. They are not subtle. Lemon myrtle will overtake a dish if you let it, pepperberry builds heat slowly and then keeps going, Davidson plum is genuinely sour. Start with less than you think, taste, adjust. This is the single most common mistake.

The ingredients worth knowing

Lemon myrtle

The one to start with, and the one most Australians have already tasted without knowing it.

The leaf of a Queensland rainforest tree, dried and ground, and it smells more like lemon than lemon does. Sharper, sweeter, with none of the sourness because there's no acid in it, just the aroma. If you've had a lemon myrtle shortbread at a market, that's the flavour.

It suits fish and seafood better than almost anything, which makes it the ingredient of an Australian Christmas. Use it on prawns, on white fish, through a dressing, or in shortbread and custard. Add it at the end of cooking, because long heat flattens it.

Start with half a teaspoon for four people. You can always add more.

Davidson plum

Deep purple, almost black, and properly sour. Closer to a damson than a plum, from the rainforests of Queensland and northern New South Wales. You would not eat one raw twice.

That sourness is the point. Most Christmas ham glazes are sugar on top of sugar, and you end up with something that tastes of nothing but sweet. A tart fruit glaze cuts through the fat and the salt instead, and you can actually taste the ham underneath. It does the same job for duck, for cheese, and in a sauce for anything rich.

The ham on our Christmas range is glazed with it, and there's a longer piece coming on exactly why that works.

Bunya nut

The seed of the bunya pine, large, starchy, somewhere between a chestnut and a potato. Boiled and sliced, it's mild, nutty and substantial, and it behaves more like a vegetable than a nut.

It goes well with scallops and other sweet seafood, works roasted alongside meat, and makes an excellent pesto if you're prepared for the boiling. Which is the catch, honestly. Bunya nuts take work, an hour or two of boiling before you can get into them. Worth it once, to know.

Finger lime

The one that has genuinely travelled. Australian finger lime turns up on menus in Paris and Tokyo now, which is a lot for a citrus most Australians haven't held.

Cut a fresh one open and the inside is full of tiny spheres that pop like caviar, releasing a sharp lime burst. They're called citrus pearls, and the appeal is as much texture as flavour. Scatter them over oysters, over a ceviche, over anything you'd hit with a squeeze of lime, right at the end. Never cook them, heat destroys the whole effect, and don't freeze them either, the pearls rupture on thawing and you lose the pop. Dried or freeze-dried finger lime is a different ingredient with the same soul, all of the fragrance and none of the texture, and it's what to reach for when the dish itself is going in the freezer.

Expensive, and a small amount goes a long way.

Macadamia

Australia's most successful food export, and the one native ingredient already in everybody's kitchen. Native to the Queensland and northern New South Wales rainforest, now grown in Hawaii, South Africa and Kenya at scale.

Buttery, rich, higher in fat than any other nut, which is exactly why it works. Roughly chop them through roast vegetables in place of almonds and the difference is immediate. Also, obviously, in shortbread, in caramel, in anything sweet.

Wattleseed

Roasted and ground, and it tastes like coffee crossed with hazelnut and a little chocolate. Nothing like what you'd expect from a seed.

Best in sweet things: ice cream, cheesecake, brownies, or through the cream in a pavlova. Also good rubbed on beef. Buy it already roasted and ground, the raw seed is a project.

Pepperberry

Also called mountain pepper, from Tasmania and the Victorian high country. Darker and fruitier than black pepper, and considerably hotter, with a heat that arrives late and then builds.

Use about a quarter of what you'd use of black pepper. Good on beef, through a sauce, and in anything where you want warmth rather than sharpness. Grind it fresh.

Saltbush

The leaf tastes faintly of salt, which is exactly as useful as it sounds. Dried and crumbled, it seasons and adds a savoury, herbal note at the same time. Excellent on lamb, on roast potatoes, and rubbed into bread dough before baking.

Putting them on a Christmas table

The point of all this isn't a themed dinner where every dish has a native ingredient in it. That reads as a gimmick and it tastes like too much.

One or two, doing a real job, is the whole approach.

Seafood with lemon myrtle. An Australian Christmas that leans on seafood rather than a hot roast is a better fit for the weather, and lemon myrtle is what makes it taste deliberate rather than like a compromise. Prawns, a side of fish, scallops.

A ham with a tart glaze. Keep the ham, it's the centrepiece and nobody wants it gone. Change the glaze from brown sugar to something sour, and the whole plate gets less heavy. If you're cooking one yourself, our Christmas ham guide covers the rest.

Sides that carry a bit of texture. Macadamias through the roast vegetables, saltbush on the potatoes.

Something sweet with wattleseed. Through the cream on a pavlova is the easiest possible entry point, and pavlova is already on the table.

Served cool, eaten outside, food that matches the weather it's being eaten in. That's the argument for all of this, and it's a fairly simple one.

Where to buy them

Better delis and grocers stock the dried ingredients, lemon myrtle, wattleseed, pepperberry, saltbush. Specialist native food suppliers sell online and their product is usually fresher. Farmers markets in growing regions are best for fresh Davidson plum and finger lime, though both are seasonal and the season is short.

Buy dried ingredients in small quantities. They're concentrated, you'll use less than you expect, and they lose their aroma after about a year in the cupboard.

If you'd rather someone else did it

All of this is genuinely good to cook. It's also December, which is not a month with much slack in it. If you're weighing up Christmas catering against doing it all yourself, we've written about that too.

Our Christmas range this year features native ingredients, handmade in small batches by local home cooks across Australia, real people cooking from family recipes and real ingredients. It arrives freshly frozen, so it can be delivered well before the day and wait until you need it.

Lemon myrtle on the seafood, Davidson plum on the ham, bunya nut with the scallops. The same ideas, without the trial and error of doing it yourself.

The short version

Australia has a pantry most of us have never opened, and it suits the way we actually eat at Christmas, in the heat, outside, with the doors open.

Start with lemon myrtle. Use less than you think. Add one native ingredient to a table you already know how to cook, rather than rebuilding the whole meal around the idea, and you'll have made something that tastes like here. Or let our cooks do it, the whole Christmas range is ready when you are.