“Perfectly, and passionately, welds
love and time into the seed, till tree
renews itself and is for ever tree.”

Judith Wright, The Wattle Tree

By Bob · Published 4 Sep 2026 · Last updated 27 Oct 2026

Wattleseed is a foundational native bush food, and one of the first native ingredients we explored on this native foods journey. We quickly learned to appreciate its nutty, savoury-sweet taste and cocoa and coffee aroma, and a kg bulk pack of roasted ground seed soon became a pantry staple. Wattleseed is now part of our sourdough loaves, the grandkids’ biscuits, flatbread sprinkles, dukkah; and it makes an excellent binding agent in curries, sauces and stews,

A mustard journey

Also I found lots of really great recipes online. One of my early favourites was Nornie Bero’s wild mushroom and wattleseed risotto (love the wattleseed pangrattato), so I have since bought a couple of her more recent cookbooks. Over the past week in the kitchen, I have been exploring a new face of wattleseed: wattleseed mustard. mustard

Wattleseed mustard

It’s been a while since mustard had a significant spot in my kitchen. I used to go through 2 kg jars of Dijon making Boston beans, glazing ham, coating roast veg and so on, so this has been a good reminder of just how much punch a good mustard carries. I made up a jar of wattleseed mustard at the beginning of the week.

Vegetable “sausage” rolls

The first dish to feature the mustard was a batch of vegetable rolls which, like the mustard, are based on a recipe in Nornie Bero’s recent Native Ingredients Every Day cookbook. I swapped the original all-warrigal-greens filling for a mix of mostly mustard leaves and kale, then doubled the mustard to make it more prominent. Result: a properly spicy, mustardy lunch … so I have dialled the mustard back a notch in our recipe.

Mustardy roast beef and vegetables

Next I tried the wattleseed mustard as a marinade on some eye fillet, with a good result. The mustard flavour didn’t come through as much as I’d hoped, so I’ve increased the amount of marinade in my recipe. As a follow-on I roasted some mustard-glazed pumpkin, which was perfect. Mustard-glazed cauliflower was next on the list for the weekend (PS: it was a success, grilled with a light cheese crust, and needed only 2 tsp of mustard for a whole cauliflower). So why all the mustard dishes? On a practical note, the 400 g jar of homemade mustard keeps only about three months, so next round it will be a make-as-you-go condiment rather than a big-batch pantry item.

Wattleseed in the food forest

We planted a wattle patch in the food forest last year: around 60 acacias. There are over 1,000 species of wattle native to Australia, but only around 100 produce edible seed, and fewer still suit cultivation. The most common commercial species is the bramble or elegant wattle (Acacia victoriae), so we planted a batch of these alongside seven other local edible acacias. About half the seedlings came through their first year, and we have a good batch in the nursery ready for a follow-up planting this spring to fill the gaps. Down the track, we still plan to host a harvest party where we all learn to collect and roast our own wattleseed crop.

Why wattles and wattleseed matter

Wattleseed tastes great, but wattles have a few other special attributes.

• Ant-planted seed: wattleseeds get some clever help getting into the ground. Many species produce a seed with a small, nutrient-rich attachment (an aril) that ants find irresistible. They cart the seed off to their nest, eat the aril, and leave the seed safely tucked underground, often to sit dormant for years until a bushfire cracks it open. Free labour, built in!
• A global good: it’s not just an Aussie story. Since the 1990s, Australian edible wattles have been planted across parts of Africa’s Sahel, including Niger, where their seed is milled into flour for bread and biscuits and stored as a drought-hardy famine reserve (Rinaudo & Cunningham 2008). Our backyard bush food has quietly been doing double duty.
• A national symbol: the golden wattle is Australia’s official floral emblem, we celebrate National Wattle Day on 1 September each year to mark the start of spring, and there’s a wattle image on every note in the Australian currency … so they must be special 🙂

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Recipes from this post

On bushbasil.org:

• Mixed green, feta & wattleseed mustard roll: vegetable “sausage” rolls of mustard greens, kale and feta, spiked with wattleseed mustard.

From elsewhere:

• Wattleseed mustard (SBS Food): the homemade mustard behind this week’s dishes.
• Wild mushroom and wattleseed risotto (Nornie Bero, delicious.): finished with wattleseed pangrattato.

More about wattleseed

• Wattleseed (Acacia spp.): species, flavour, growing, 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, “The wattleseed adventure”, bushbasil.org, last updated 27 October 2026, https://bushbasil.org/this-week-wattleseed/