Wattleseed ✦

Graines d’acacia

What it is

Australia has close to a thousand acacia species and only a handful are safe to eat, so wattleseed is bought by botanical name — Acacia victoriae above all. Roasted and ground it smells of coffee, cocoa and hazelnut while containing none of them, which is what carried it out of desert country and into the bush-food trade in the 1980s.

In the kitchen

Infuse it, do not stir it in: a tablespoon steeped twenty minutes in a litre of hot cream or milk, then strained, behaves exactly like coffee grounds. Left in the mix the grounds stay gritty and never dissolve, and a custard made that way is unpleasant on the tongue.

Goes with

Cream Dark chocolate Coffee Vanilla Macadamia Honey Milk chocolate

Also used with

Tasmanian pepperberry

Something wrong here, or missing? Tell us