Finicky, unpredictable and producing only a small amount of flesh, quandongs don’t make things easy for Australian farmers. Despite this, their unique taste has increasingly seen them elevated from bush tucker to haute cuisine in recent years.
Morning Calm (Korean Air inflight magazine), December 2017

It’s often joked that Australia’s native animals look like a zoo experiment gone wrong. The echidna resembles a cross between an anteater and a porcupine; the wombat looks like a bizarre mix of bear, pig and gopher, while the platypus is so much like an otter crossed with a duck that 18th-century Europeans thought it was an elaborate hoax.

The country’s flora can be just as weird. Take the quandong: it looks like a miniature pomegranate, tastes a bit like a plum and is often called the “desert peach.”

With such unique properties, it’s no surprise that chefs are waking up to the culinary possibilities of this quirky fruit.

Measuring about 2cm, quandongs are stone fruits that grow wild in the desert and semiarid regions of southern and inland Australia.

“The taste is somewhere between a plum and maybe apricot, but not sweet like we’re used to with Western-developed fruits — they’re quite tart,” says Mike Quarmby of Australian native food company Outback Pride.

“There’s a lot of plumminess about them, but with the texture of a crisp apricot that’s not ripe.”

Read the full article online at the Morning Calm website