A Field Guide to Native Ingredients

Quandong — the desert peach

A tart, bright-red fruit from the arid zone that tastes like rhubarb crossed with apricot, with a tannic finish that cuts fat brilliantly. We cook it down into the condiment beside the lamb and use it dried in the duck course. It is one of the few native ingredients with genuine mainstream potential — if you remember one word from this list, make it quandong.

Wattleseed — Australia's coffee bean

Roasted and ground, wattleseed tastes like coffee, chocolate and hazelnut arguing pleasantly. It is our dessert workhorse — the panna cotta that never leaves the menu — and it also makes the crust on the venison taste like something ancient. Indigenous communities have eaten it for tens of thousands of years; it is arguably the most underused flavour in the national pantry.

Saltbush and the seasoning trick

Saltbush grows where nothing else will and tastes faintly of the sea. Our lamb grazes on it — pre-salted from the inside — and we also dry the leaves into a seasoning salt for the table. When a guest says the lamb tastes 'seasoned all the way through', that is the saltbush doing what a brine never could.

Finger lime and the caviar of the bush

A native citrus whose vesicles burst like roe — little pearls of lime juice that stay separate until you bite them. We scatter them over oysters and raw fish, where a squeeze of normal lime would flood the plate. They are expensive, seasonal and worth every complaint from the accountant.

Where it comes from matters

Most of our native ingredients come from Indigenous-owned suppliers — the quandong from a family business in the Flinders, the wattleseed from a cooperative near Alice Springs. Provenance in the native pantry carries extra weight because the knowledge behind these foods was never written in supplier catalogues; it was held in community. Buying properly is the least we can do.