Wattleseed: The Roasted Acacia Seed With a Coffee-and-Chocolate Aroma

Wattleseed smells of coffee and chocolate, but it comes from a tree: it’s the seed of certain Australian acacias (wattles), dried, roasted and ground into a dark powder. It was a staple food for Aboriginal Australians long before it turned up in ice cream and bread. The raw seed is extremely hard and has to be roasted and ground before you eat it, and once it is, you can even brew it like plunger coffee.

At a glance

Which acacias

A study for FAO notes that the seeds of about 50 Australian dry-zone acacia species, including Acacia colei, were an important part of the traditional Aboriginal diet.³ The Royal Society of Victoria names Acacia victoriae, the elegant wattle, as the most common edible species.² It’s a tree native to Australia’s desert and dry shrubland. Warndu, an Aboriginal-owned food business, says Australia has six common edible wattleseeds, and its own product lists A. victoriae and/or a second species.⁴

Green and gold, proclaimed Australia’s national colors in 1984, are also the colors of the national floral emblem, the golden wattle.⁵ That’s a different wattle from the elegant wattle, the main edible species.

Flavor

The roasted seed smells of roasted coffee, sweet spice, raisin and chocolate, and it tastes savory, nutty and like a wheat biscuit. It’s also used as a coffee or hazelnut substitute. We didn’t find any study of wattleseed’s aroma compounds.

History and traditional use

The Royal Society of Victoria says wattleseed became a staple more than 6,000 years ago, though it doesn’t give the evidence for that date.² The same article describes how pods were beaten from the branches and collected. Women milled the seed between two flat grinding stones into flour, kneaded it with water into dough and cooked it on hot coals as cakes or damper. In some cases, it adds, the raw green seeds can be eaten.

We couldn’t trace a widely repeated date of 4,000 years, or a claim that the dough was sometimes eaten raw. We also found no source supporting the claim that swapping wattleseed flour for white wheat flour drove diabetes in Aboriginal communities.

Acacia seed as a famine food in the Sahel

Australian acacias have been tried as food far from home. Researchers from CSIRO, a Niger development project and a Nigerian university describe how Acacia colei was widely planted in southern Niger in the late 1980s, to ease fuelwood shortages and serve as windbreaks. Villagers around Maradi caught on to the seed’s food potential in 1989, and local cooks worked the flour into their millet and sorghum dishes. The authors report that people found the acacia foods acceptable in taste, though most volunteers turned down one sorghum dish because it was black.³

Nutrition

The best data we found are for Acacia colei, not the species usually sold as wattleseed: about 23% crude protein, 53% carbohydrate and 11% fat, with tryptophan, methionine and cysteine as the limiting amino acids.³ Warndu gives 18 to 25% protein for wattleseed in general, and a table of 20.1 g protein, 30.0 g carbohydrate and 5.2 g fat per 100 g for its product. Warndu also says wattleseed has an unusually low glycemic index and high concentrations of potassium, calcium, iron and zinc, but gives no measurements for those claims.⁴

How it is used

Raw seed is extremely hard. Warndu says it has to be roasted and ground before you eat it, and that today it’s dried and roasted much like coffee.⁴ Ways to use it:

• Desserts. Warndu lists ice cream, sorbet, mousse, yogurt, cheesecake and whipped cream.
• Baking. It goes well in bread, and can replace a small part of the flour.
• Sauces. Warndu also uses it to thicken casseroles and sauces.
• As a drink. Brew it like plunger (French press) coffee.
• Whole seed. Warndu toasts whole roasted seed in a dry pan until it pops, as a sprinkle.

Ratio (Method): Try a teaspoon of ground wattleseed in a batch of ice cream base or cookie dough to start, and adjust to taste.

Buying and storage

Look for a supplier that names the acacia species. We found no published shelf-life figure. Treat it like ground coffee: keep it airtight and away from heat and light, and judge it by smell.

Safety

Only some acacias are eaten, so buy your seed from a food supplier, not off a garden tree. In the Niger studies, A. colei seed had no known toxic or antinutritional factors at levels of concern. But rats fed a diet of 40% acacia seed flour showed some adverse effects, and the authors warned that a mix of A. colei flour and cassava might be harmful.³ Those findings are for one species at high dietary levels, not for wattleseed used as a spice.

Substitutes and related pages

• Wattleseed substitutes
• Australian spices
• Lemon myrtle