Wattleseed

Coffee, chocolate and roasted hazelnut, with a mild bitterness and no acidity — and this is the practical difference from coffee, which is sour as well as bitter. There is no caffeine, so it delivers the flavour of a stimulant without being one.

Roasted coffee and cocoa with a nutty, hazelnut edge, and a faint sweetness. It smells almost exactly like something a reader already knows, which is unusual in this catalogue and is entirely a consequence of the roast.

Dark brown to near black once roasted and ground, closely resembling coarse coffee grounds.

Gritty. The ground seed does not dissolve and does not soften much, so a preparation that leaves it suspended has a texture like fine coffee grounds — which is why most uses infuse and strain.

• Pyrazines and Maillard products — The entire flavour. These are formed during roasting rather than present in the seed, which is why raw wattleseed tastes of almost nothing and why roast level changes the product more than origin does.

Steep rather than stir wherever the texture will show. A teaspoon in warm cream or milk for twenty minutes, then strained through a fine sieve, gives the flavour without the grit, and this is the single technique that makes the difference between wattleseed working and wattleseed being gritty. In a batter or dough the crumb carries the grind and no straining is needed. Do not toast it again — it arrives roasted, and further heat takes it to burnt faster than seems reasonable. Start with less than a recipe for a comparable coffee flavouring would use: it is bitter without being acidic, and the bitterness accumulates.

Almost entirely a sweet ingredient in modern use, and it behaves like an unsweetened coffee or cocoa rather than like an aromatic spice. Steeped in cream or milk and strained, it flavours ice cream, custards and panna cotta; stirred into a batter it goes into biscuits, breads and chocolate cakes; it appears in beer and in coffee-style drinks. Its one structural advantage over coffee is the absence of acidity, which makes it easier to put into dairy without the balance going wrong, and the absence of caffeine.

• toasting — Already done before sale, and doing it again is how most people ruin it: the seed arrives roasted, and further heat pushes it from coffee towards burnt very quickly.
• infusing — The standard and the best treatment. Steeped in warm cream, milk or syrup and then strained, which extracts the flavour and leaves the grit behind. This is how it goes into ice cream, panna cotta and sauces.
• baking — Used directly in doughs and batters, where the grit is carried by the crumb and reads as texture rather than as a fault. It survives baking well, because the compounds responsible were made by heat in the first place.
• boiling — Extracts readily into hot liquid. Prolonged boiling brings the bitterness forward without adding anything, so a short steep off the heat is better than a long simmer.

Smell it against the memory of fresh coffee grounds. Good wattleseed smells sweetly roasted; stale wattleseed smells flat, and rancid wattleseed has a cardboard or old-nut note under the roast that is easy to miss and obvious once looked for.

• A cardboard or old-nut smell beneath the roast, indicating rancid oil
• Flat bitterness with no sweetness
• Caking into lumps, indicating moisture

• Rancidity of the seed oil, which is the dominant mechanism and the one most readers will not expect from something that looks like coffee.
• Loss of the lighter roast aromatics, leaving flat bitterness
• Moisture uptake and caking in a damp cupboard

Ground, and this is the one spice here where that is not a concession. The flavour is made by roasting rather than released by grinding, so the argument that applies to cumin and coriander — that the volatile fraction disappears from pre-ground spice — has much less force. What does apply is rancidity, so the sensible discipline is buying small quantities often rather than buying whole.

• A supplier who states the species, which matters here more than for any other spice in this catalogue.
• A stated roast level, since roast varies more between suppliers than origin does and is the main determinant of flavour.
• A sweet roasted smell with no cardboard or old-nut note beneath it.
• Small quantities, because the failure mode is rancidity and most people use it a teaspoon at a time.
• Where it matters to you, a supplier who is Indigenous-owned or who states its sourcing arrangements — a question the Australian native-food industry itself treats as live.

Fabaceae

Shrubs and small trees of dry and semi-arid Australia, most bearing phyllodes — flattened leaf stalks — rather than true leaves, with the dense yellow flower heads the genus is known for. The seeds are hard, dark and small, borne in pods, and are drought-hardy enough to have been a reliable food in years when little else was.

Australia, across the arid and semi-arid interior and into the drier parts of the south and west. The species used are native to and largely confined to the continent.

• AU — origin. Effectively the whole of production. Supply comes from a mixture of wild harvest and small-scale cultivation, and the industry is small by any spice-trade measure.

Mature pods collected and threshed to release the hard dry seed. The traditional preparations across the continent include both the green immature seed and the mature dry seed, and the commercial spice uses the latter.

1. Threshing and cleaning — Dry seed separated from pods and cleaned.
2. Roasting — Roasted to a dark brown, which is the step that creates the flavour rather than developing an existing one.Why: The raw seed is a hard legume and tastes of very little. Everything wattleseed is valued for — the coffee, chocolate and hazelnut character — is produced by Maillard reactions during roasting, so the roast is the product in a way that is true of almost nothing else in this catalogue.
3. Grinding — Ground to a coarse or fine powder depending on the intended use.Why: The roasted seed is too hard to use whole, and grinding is what makes extraction into a liquid possible.

A mixture of wild harvest and planted stands, with commercial plantings still limited. Yields are variable between years, which is the ordinary condition of a semi-arid crop and one reason supply and price move more than they do for established spices.

Arid and semi-arid, with the food species selected in part for exactly that: they crop in conditions where little else does, which is why Acacia seed was a dependable food rather than an occasional one.

Acacia seed has been a food across much of the Australian continent for a very long time, gathered, ground and cooked by many distinct Aboriginal peoples, with different species used in different Countries and different preparations attached to them. The commercial spice is a different and much shorter story: ground roasted wattleseed as a jarred flavouring emerged with the Australian bush-food industry in the 1980s, which makes it the most recent product in this catalogue by a considerable margin.

A small domestic industry with limited export, supplied by a mixture of wild harvest and small plantings. It is not separately reported in the international production statistics.