Bush foods boom feeding high-end diners

Celebrity chefs in their high-end restaurants have just cottoned on to the bitter and unique flavours of Australian berries and leaves and are now ordering hundreds of kilograms of bush foods every week.

A South Australian couple with long outback connections are the ones literally putting bush foods on the menu.

In the foodie world, Kylie Kwong is known for her Asian-influenced cuisine.

In recent months her menu has been evolving in a particularly Australian manner.

"[It] showcases the vivid flavours of organically-grown bush foods and wild weeds," she said.

In the kitchen of her Sydney restaurant, Kylie Kwong and her team are cooking with native leaves and vegetables - the names of which would be a mystery to most diners - such things as saltbush, warrigal greens, samphire and sea parsley.

The glamorous top end of town where the unusual dishes are prepared and served is about 1,500 kilometres and a world away from the origin of some of the ingredients.

In South Australia's south-eastern corner, Mike and Gayle Quarmby are constantly harvesting native leaves in their nursery.

They have driven countless kilometres across Australia in search of the best seeds from bush plants.

"Saltbush is a good example. Most of the best stuff in the bush has been eaten out by sheep," Mike Quarmby explained.

But he found old man saltbush where sheep had not been, at a Broken Hill mine and on an island in the Lachlan River.

A horticulturalist by trade, he grew 150,000 seedlings and selected the most tender leaves.

He will not patent his plants because he wants them to be accessible to Indigenous people, but he has DNA fingerprinted the saltbush so no-one else can slap a patent on it.

Big demand

No longer travelling such long distances, the Quarmbys are busier than ever as they churn out jams and sauces in a tin shed on their property at Reedy Creek.

Foodies such as Kylie Kwong and Neil Perry are demanding big weekly shipments of freshly-picked native leaves and berries.

So every week, Gayle Quarmby gets into a refrigerated van and drives the fresh produce 250 kilometres to Adelaide Airport so it can be flown to interstate restaurants, as well as to supermarkets in Indonesia and Singapore.

"Life is crazy, wonderful but we are doing it," she said.

There is demand for annual production to at least double from five to 10 tonnes of fresh leaves, so the Quarmbys are about to embark on an expansion of their modest nursery at Reedy Creek.

They are building new greenhouses and say their windswept, out-of-the-way location is ideal for growing.

The wind works in their favour, keeping fungal diseases at bay.

An ample supply of thermal aquifer water is used to warm the greenhouses.

Cooled in tanks, it also provides irrigation, while composted seaweed from a local beach is a wonderful growing medium.

School bond

As many bush plants originate in the desert, the Quarmbys struck up un unusual bond with a high school in the hotter and drier Riverland region of SA.

"We have a great agricultural science master there," Mike Quarmby said.

"Ian Howard is a gem in that he has really come on board and has accepted the responsibility for this project from the beginning and has made it work."

For his part, Mr Howard said: "You can't go and sort of learn it from a manual. It is difficult but extraordinarily rewarding ... especially to involve the students, to get the students involved with something that is leading edge, which is real and relevant."

The Farm Management Centre of Renmark High School is having success with kutjera, a desert raisin, sometimes also known as a bush tomato.

The marsdenia, or bush banana, is also looking like a winner.

The Renmark High plot has been in for four years and is steadily supplying mostly kutjera and marsdenia.

Mike Quarmby takes an active role in teaching how to plant and harvest the crops.

Ian Howard says some local Aboriginal youths are learning important life skills.

"I think we're gradually learning to understand what makes these young Aboriginal people tick and I think, given a little bit of time, we will be successful in what we are setting out to do," he said.

One of the students, Rhys Loughhead, spoke of the successes.

"We have found out what works and what doesn't work. We found out that the weeds, wreck the plants and the ants help pollinate, as well as the bees," he said.

The Quarmbys have a contract to buy all the school farm can produce and they pay the market rate for it.

Source: ABC News, 12 June 2012