Native Roasted Wattleseed

Unknown, Underrated and Unlike Anything Else: This is The Time for Wattleseed Tea

Sometimes there is a food or a drink that just slips under the radar for some reason. We know it’s there, but it doesn’t have the star quality that others do, so it remains unloved, unrated and unforgivably overlooked. Such is the case with wattleseeds, which have been part of Australia’s culture for centuries, yet remained the province of the indigenous community without making it into the wider nation’s store cupboards and recipe books.

All that is changing, though, as the flavour of wattleseeds comes to be appreciated along with their nutritional value. They contain calcium, zinc, magnesium, iron, potassium, selenium, and protein, and have a low glycaemic index, which means they don’t elevate blood sugar levels. Wattleseeds are sufficiently well regarded to have been exported to Africa to help with that continent’s nutritional needs in times of famine.

This is all good news, but what about flavour? With taste being notoriously difficult to define, the best we can do is mention things like chocolate, coffee, and hazelnuts: you get the general idea. If you like your tea to taste like black tea, you drink black tea. If it’s the purity and clean taste of green tea that floats your boat, you know what to buy. As with all our less mainstream teas, their individuality is part of the appeal, and every good tea shop has its own style, so if you are looking for a fascinating addition to your range, wattleseed could be just the thing.

More and more these days, tea lovers at home are adding some different varieties to their cupboards to ring the changes for themselves from time to time and to give visitors something unusual to try. It’s a lot of fun being a tea lover. Let the blinkered multitudes plough on with their bland supermarket staples; they are missing out on some beautiful flavours.

Wattleseeds can be eaten “green”, which in this case means cooked, or dried and ground into flour. They are suitable for both sweet and savoury dishes, and if they are so versatile and delicious, it stands to reason that they can make tasty drinks too: hence the development of wattleseed tea. We at Teavision have scoured the world for interesting, healthy, flavourful herbs and spices that will make a great hot drink (or a chilled one), so with wattleseeds right under our nose, it should come as no surprise that wattleseed tea should be one of the up-and-coming stars of our world.

AKA Acacia

Wattleseeds come from the acacia tree and the tea is sometimes called acacia. It’s a point worth considering that acacia sounds more tea-like and more elegant than wattle does, so perhaps a simple change of name would have accelerated the rise of wattleseed tea. However, wattleseed is what it’s known as and the word has no effect on the taste, so if the world can fall in love with something called lapsang souchong, and if pu-erh and even nettle tea are perfectly acceptable, why not wattleseed?Read Less