Ingredient
Wattleseed is a nutritious roasted grain (acacia seeds) which boasts an amazing coffee, chocolate, hazelnut flavour which can be used in both savoury and sweet dishes.
The Aboriginal people for over 6000 years used to parch and mill wattleseed from around 100 species of Acacia, to make coarse flour which was then baked into seed cakes. However, it wasn’t till 1984 when Vic Cherikoff took a phone call while he was experimenting with lightly toasting wattleseed and accidently roasted them too much to create the modern day product.
Wattleseed is available either as a ground powder or liquid essence for ease of use. The ground wattleseecd is easily softened in hot water and is ready to use in just a few minutes. Because of wattleseed’s uniquely chocolate, coffee, hazelnut flavour there are a number of commercial products now available featuring wattleseed such as bread pre mixes, chocolates, ice-creams, granola and mousse mixes to name just a few.
Numerous Aboriginal communities together with non-Aboriginal harvesters now gather the small wattleseed from over a million square miles of outback Australia.
Wattleseed is a great inclusion in anyone’s diet as it has an unusually low glycaemic index which means that the carbohydrates in it are slowly absorbed and therefore better for you than sugary, quick release alternatives. Wattleseed can also be incorporated into foods to lower the overall GI and either just improve its nutritional value or to actually make some food acceptable for people with non-insulin dependent diabetes.
I find the best preparation for most wattleseed dishes is to put the ground wattleseed into an espresso machine and extract it as if I was making an espresso coffee. Depending on the recipe you may have to allow the wattleseed liquid to cool before using it in your recipe.
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Other recipes with Wattleseed
This is Vic Cherikoff’s flagship dish and has to be a contender for an Australian national dish.
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Panna cotta is Italian for “cooked cream” and generally refers to a sweet, creamy and set dessert from the Northern Italy, but for this recipe I've used wattleseed.
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bush tucker
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aboriginal food
Creamy indulgent dessert with a chocolate, coffee and hazelnut flavour
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Nearly ever café serves banana bread, but this easy recipe is a great way to use up over ripe bananas at home.
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The coffee, chocolate and hazelnut flavours of the wattleseed pair well with white chocolate.
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