“Knowledge is knowing a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad.”

Miles Kington, The Independent, 28 March 2003

By Bob · Published 30 Oct 2026 · Last updated 30 Oct 2026

Last week we minced up some beef from the freezer and set about making sausages … and noticed we were out of tomato sauce (again). So we set off to make a batch. I have been making various tomato and BBQ sauces at the farm regularly over the past decade, and more and more often I have looked to include native ingredients. This is the story of that journey. But first …

The tomato sauce story

Tomato sauces are a Mesoamerican invention. Tomatoes were cooked into sauces and flavour bases in Mexico and Central America long before Europeans arrived, and they are still the foundation of Mexican salsas, beans and more today. Europeans, by contrast, adopted the tomato slowly and reluctantly. Spanish conquistadors brought it home in the 1500s, but for many years it was grown mostly as an ornamental, and in northern Europe and England it was long suspected of being poisonous, like its nightshade cousins. The first Italian tomato sauce recipe was published in Naples in 1692, described as “in the Spanish style”. From there tomatoes slowly fused into flavour bases like the Spanish sofrito that starts a paella, and the Italian sauces, like arrabbiata, that dress a bowl of pasta.

Only much more recently were condiment tomato sauces popularised i.e. sauces added to a dish after it is cooked. The first published tomato ketchup recipe, by Philadelphia scientist James Mease, dates from 1812, and these vinegared, sugared, shelf-stable sauces were commercialised soon after, most famously with the launch of Heinz ketchup in 1876. Today tomato sauce sits alongside soy sauce as one of the world’s most widely used condiments … soy sauce the staple across Asia, and tomato sauce on the table in Western households (and fast-food chains!).

The bush tomato story

Now the bush tomato (Solanum centrale) has been a food here for many thousands of years: long before tomatoes became the defining ingredient of Italian cooking, and long before the Maya and Inca civilisations. It goes by many names across Central Australia, including akatjurra in Alyawarr and kampurarpa in Pitjantjatjara, and in the native food trade it is usually sold as akudjura or kutjera, or as desert raisin. Our bush tomato is related to the garden tomato: both belong to the large genus Solanum in the nightshade family (Solanaceae), but they are different species.

And, as Miles Kington would say, a little knowledge goes a long way: our bush tomato is a botanical fruit, just like a garden tomato. What grows on the plant is technically a berry containing seeds. But it is not used or eaten like a garden tomato. Unlike its distant cousin, whose wild ancestors come from the Andes, the bush tomato is native only to the arid regions of Australia, where the small fruits dry on the bush into something like a raisin. Aboriginal people have eaten them as a vital staple for tens of thousands of years, and traditional preparation focused on preserving the fruit for sustenance: dried fruit was ground into a paste, rolled into balls and dried in the sun, then stored, sometimes wedged into the fork of a tree, for later. So they never needed a tomato sauce!

Bush tomato is still something of an undiscovered gem. Most of it is wild harvested in Central Australia, much of it by Aboriginal women, and a crop that dries on the bush is at the mercy of the desert seasons. This year it has been hard to buy in anything bigger than small packets, which makes every spoonful count … and happily, a little goes a long way.

Bush tomato sauce

So the modern “bush tomato sauce” is a fusion of native ingredients with introduced European preserving techniques like vinegar and sugar. There is no “standard” recipe, but most variations include the gentle earthiness of some dried or ground bush tomato. A little does go a long way: bush tomato brings a concentrated, almost smoky caramel-savoury depth to the base of the sauce that makes it taste as though it has been cooking for far longer than it has. Here are three sauces from our kitchen.

Bush tomato and bush basil

The most common native herb pairing here is bush basil. It is not at all like Italian basil, but it brings its own bold, aromatic character to the sauce. We add fresh bush basil in two rounds: torn leaves go in with the tomatoes, mellowing into something warm and resinous as the sauce cooks down; then, off the heat, a handful of smaller leaves is folded through at the finish, with just enough residual warmth to coax out the volatile top notes without burning them off. The result is a sauce with real depth and a fragrance that is unmistakably Australian. It’s the base of Bob’s tomato & BBQ sauce.

Bush tomato with lemon myrtle, native thyme and river mint

The second sauce also uses bush tomato for its earthy, sun-dried complexity and depth, but this is then “lifted” with a trio of native herbs. Lemon myrtle adds a sharp citrus tang, native thyme an earthy, resinous warmth, and river mint, folded in off the heat at the very end, a clean, cooling finish. With such a familiar-sounding line-up of herbs, the sauce tastes a little familiar, and surprising at the same time!

A bush tomato sauce without bush tomato

The final recipe makes a bush tomato sauce from native ingredients without adding any bush tomato at all, using other unique local flora in its place. Handy in a year when bush tomato is hard to find!

A word of warning: fresh tomato goes off!

Tomatoes are only mildly acidic, and a tomato sauce is mostly water, which makes it a welcoming home for moulds and bacteria once a bottle is opened. That is why classic condiment sauces lean on vinegar, sugar and salt: together they keep a bottle of tomato sauce safe in the pantry for months. Cooking sauces like our arrabbiata leave those out, so they must live in the fridge and be used within a week or two, or be frozen. (We learned this the hard way: one bottle forgotten in the hall pantry had mould growing on top within a month.)

The same caution applies to any sauce where lemon myrtle stands in for some of the vinegar: lemon myrtle brings the lemony tang but not the acidity, so treat it as a fridge sauce. For long pantry storage, bottle the sauce hot into sterilised bottles and stick to a preserving recipe with its full measure of vinegar.

---

Recipes from this post

On bushbasil.org:

• Bob’s tomato & BBQ sauce: our pantry tomato and BBQ sauces, with bush tomato for depth and bush basil added in two stages.
• Arrabbiata pasta sauce, with bush basil: the cooking-sauce cousin, a fiery tomato, garlic and chilli sauce for pasta.
• Bush tomato sauce with lemon myrtle, native thyme and river mint (recipe coming soon).
• Bush tomato sauce without bush tomato (recipe coming soon).

From elsewhere:

• Bush tomato recipes (SBS Food): more ways to cook with bush tomato.
• Bush tomatoes (Outback Spirit): a guide to the ingredient and how to use it.
• Bush tomato (Warndu First Nations Food Guide): names, flavour and traditional preparation.

More about the native herbs in these sauces

• Bush Basil (Coleus graveolens): growing, flavour, cooking tips and more recipes.
• Native Thyme (Prostanthera incisa): growing, flavour, cooking tips and more recipes.
• Native River Mint (Mentha australis): growing, flavour, cooking tips and more recipes.
• Bush Food Recipes: all our recipes using Australian native ingredients.

Licence and how to cite this post

Text on this page is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Please cite as: Bush Basil, “A saucy bush tomato journey”, bushbasil.org, last updated 30 October 2026, https://bushbasil.org/a-saucy-bush-tomato-journey/