Quandongs

"To date the quest for the perfect Quandong has proven elusive." Nullarbor Net

Bush tucker is a thing isn't it? And quandongs are one of the poster fruits of the genre - if you can call it that. So what is it and when are we going to be able to buy it in the supermarket? (I did a quick search on the Coles and Woolworths websites and neither of them have any quandong products.)

Yesterday we visited friends in the country who have a farm in the Brisbane Ranges, and experiment with this and that. One of the things they were experimenting with was quandongs - thinking that they might be a niche, well-priced fruit to grow. But so far (they only have a few trees to test it out), they are not impressed.

When we visited the trees were covered in fruit - they are certainly prolific, but as they pointed out they don't really taste of much, and there isn't actually a lot of fruit on each fruit as you can see from the picture above. The fruit is mostly, in fact, the nut in the middle. As I said the taste was not of much and the texture was sort of dry and a bit mushy. Not really like a peach - it's also called the native peach. Of course, this may have just been that the fruit from this particular tree was not good - if I had grown it I would not have been surprised but our friends are accomplished gardeners, so a bit surprising.

So what is the quandong? It's actually a member of the sandalwood family and indeed the Australian Aborigines prize its wood for bowls and similar artefacts. It is also semi-parasitic, as it derives a great deal of its nutrients from the roots of other nearby plants, though apparently it does not kill them. Can't be very helpful though I would have thought.

Long-prized by the indigenous Australians it is one of the plants chosen by 'bush tucker' proponents to push as a gourmet ingredient. So far though it doesn't really seem to have made much of an impression. I found an interview with one farmer who said that the harvests were a bit erratic and that harvesting was labour intensive. They had to be picked by hand as they damaged easily if knocked off the tree. And you needed to remove the kernel immediately - also by hand, and then dry or freeze the fruit. So somewhat perishable it seems which is always a disadvantage. It also seems that a viable commercial variety has yet to be really developed, although obviously there are some - otherwise my friends would not have had any - or the few farmers who are trying them out as a crop. The CSIRO is working on it - they have been since 1973.

Most of the articles I found about what to do with them, described the taste as tart - maybe, but not overly so from my experience at least. And it seems that their main uses are in jam, chutney, pies and crumbles, although I did see an ice-cream recipe and also a glaze for kangaroo.

On the plus side they are full of vitamin C - one small apricot sized fruit has much more than than one orange. The seed inside the kernel is also used in essential oils and one enterprising lady went through a very laborious process to make flour out of the seed.

There is no disputing their beauty though. Or their hardiness. In the wild they grow in semi-desert areas, and are salt tolerant too. So if they could just expand the fruit bit, give it a bit more flavour and make it easier to harvest they could be on to a winner.