Food and Drink

Your Guide to Foraging in Australia According to the Experts

"Start in your garden."

how to forage safely

Grab your swag, a map and a few mates—this is The Great Escape, your modern camper’s guide to getting off-grid under the Southern Cross. Cruise over to the rest of our coverage for stargazing guides, birdwatching tips, and learn how to get the most out of Earth’s best playground with sustainability in mind. Make campfire cocktails, discover how to forage safely, and cook gourmet meals in the wild (because you can do better than baked beans).

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There are risks involved in eating wild plants. Please do not eat any wild plants until you have verified with your health professional that they are safe for you. This article is for informational purposes only.

Foraging is not a new word, but it’s a word we hear more of. The act of gathering wild food for free is growing in popularity as the cost of living rises and we become more conscious of our impact on the planet.

Whether in rural Australia or an urban city, foraging for edible plants is possible anywhere—even in a car park. The woodlands, forests, and countryside have more variety and abundance, but urban foraging is as easy as picking a mulberry from a tree in the park.

READ MORE: The Best National Parks in Australia

Although not all plants and fruits are edible, knowing what to look for when foraging is essential. You don’t want to accidentally throw in some magic mushrooms in your risotto (or do you). This is where the experts come in.

Diego Bonetto, author of Eat Weeds: A Field Guide to Foraging, is a master of identifying and cooking with weeds.

Chef Elijah Holland is also a foraging expert who turned his love of wild food into a career and an opportunity to educate people on nature’s bounty.

Martin and Sally have just started their foraging journey on their property, The Backwoods, but it has already taught them about how the environment and its fruits benefit us.

how to safely forage
Photo: @hellenealgie and @fatofthelandandsea

How to Forage for Weeds

Bonetto was a born forager. As he explains, foraging was once as common as going to the store, but then it slowly faded away for most. Bonetto grew up in Italy, where foraging is still widely practised, although, since relocating to Australia in the mid-1990s, Bonetto has continued to forage weeds here, in Sydney. He scours the city’s parks, beaches, and backyards in pursuit of dandelions, warrigal greens, flatweed, and African olives.

According to Bonetto, Sydney is rampant with edible plants,” you just need to know how to identify them.”

Identifying plants should be the first thing on any budding foragers list. Bonetto explains that the world is yours once you can identify weeds and plants. To help you identify species, you can get a copy of Bonetto’s book, Eat Weeds. Once you have a few species under your belt, it’s time to start foraging.

“Start in your garden. Look at the plants around you before venturing into a forest. It can be overwhelming for beginner foragers. Slowly build up your botanical literacy, understanding of what weeds are safe to eat and the medicinal properties of certain species,” say Bonetto.

Some common weeds Bonetto lists include dandelion, sheep sorrel, wild fennel, purslane, chickweed, and mallow.

“Dandelion is one of the most nutritious foods in the world, and they live right outside our doors. It’s a bitter herb, but in Italy, we use it to make pestos and salsa verde. I love it for bruschetta.”

“Purslane is another excellent weed, high in omega-three fatty acids. It works well cooked, steamed, in soups, pickled or in pies. It’s easy to identify due to its succulent look and spreading behaviour.

“If it’s not the season for Purslane, Chickweed is a little crawler you can find everywhere. It’s high in vitamins and is excellent raw in salads or sandwiches.”

Bonetto explains that foraging is undergoing a revival due to the hospitality industry’s tension on wild ingredients. “Bars love adding wild foods to their drinks, and chefs are experimenting with wild weeds to entice and engage their diners. Most of all, people are reawakening the idea of wild things. In times of scarcity, our instincts kick in, and we become foragers again, looking for food we can source ourselves.”

how to safely forage
Photo: @natures.pick

Where to forage succulents, spinaches, wildflowers and seaweeds

Chef Elijah Holland would agree with Bonetto’s observation that wild foods are in demand. As a son of a botanist and a horticulturist, Holland grew up foraging for berries and plants—under the guise of his parents and grandparents. Today, he supplies native and foraged ingredients to Australia’s top restaurants with his business, Nature’s Pick.

“It started with supplying ingredients to Alessandro Pavoni for his restaurant Ormeggio at the Spit, then other restaurants contacted us, and before we knew it, Noma in Melbourne was on our phone, says Holland.”

Holland was the head forager at Noma for a year before venturing to China, where he opened nine restaurants centred around locally foraged ingredients. He then attended world food summits and gained recognition for his foraging expertise in Europe and Asia. Today, Holland is the Executive Chef at Loti in St Kilda, where he designs a menu around wild foods. He’s an expert when it comes to ingredients found in Victoria and New South Wales.

“In Sydney, you’ll find a lot of warrigal greens around the coastal areas and turkey rhubarb, which is a beautiful type of wild sorrow you won’t find in Victoria—the climate is different,” says Holland.

In Victoria, Holland explains, there’s an abundance of bower spinach—a type of beach spinach. The cooler climate also fosters the growth of kelp, seaweed, and dead man’s fingers.

“Down here (VIC), we have mountain pepper and a lot more mint bushes. In Sydney, you will find more wildflowers. There are quite a few different things all over the country, you just need to do some research to figure out what’s edible,” he says.

“One of my biggest tips for beginning foragers is to study and research to know what you’re picking and looking for. Second, if not even more important, ensure you’re doing it in an understanding and sustainable way. Anything you pick shouldn’t hurt the environment,” says Holland.

Elijah recommends foragers look for ingredients that are invasive and harmful to the environment. He explains that there are many naturalised plants and ingredients that can be removed from the environment to help it but are also safe for human consumption.

“This is why you need to know about plants and their properties. There’s no point in foraging anything to get yourself or someone else sick.”

how to safely forage
Photo: @thebackwoodsaustralia

Why you should forage in your backyard

Every foraging expert starts somewhere; for Martin Bushby and his wife Sally, that was their property—The Backwoods.

“My wife was doing a Diploma of Organic Farming, and we had to identify weeds in our area for one of the assignments. We read through the list of weeds in the state and noticed most of the weeds identified were beneficial to the environment, and more importantly, were edible,” says Martin.

Martin and Sally run their farm with the idea that there’s no real permanent food production system designed by man. Instead, they’re on a mission to restore and integrate food production into the environment to create a permanent food production system.

“We stopped using terms like weeds and natives to have a more holistic view of what our landscape could look like. Most people, when they grow something, they manipulate the landscape to do it, but we look to our landscape to see what it can do for us,” he says.

Hence, why Martin and Sally named their property, The backwoods.

On the property, Martin and Sally pick quandongs and (wild) cherries. Although, instead of cooking the berries, the couple collected seeds and planted them on the property to provide an abundance of the ingredient.

“We love to dry quandong and eat it with some nuts and other dried fruit. It’s high in vitamin C and tastes similar to a Cranberry, so rather than adding sugar and turning it into jam, we’re getting the most benefit from its natural state,” says Martin.

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Food and Drink

Red Rooster Is Serving Free Chicken and Piping Hot Cash This Christmas in July

Get your early dose of festive cheer.

Red Rooster Christmas in July
Instagram / @redrooster_au

The cold weather in most parts of Australia coinciding with EOFY celebrations is the closest thing that we’ll get to snowy Christmas vibes. And if you’re in dire need of some festive cheer after the first six months of 2023, grab your ugly sweater and head to your nearest Red Rooster for Xmas in July deals.

From June 29 – July 31, 2023, Red Rooster is serving up free food items, a chance to win $10,000 or one of 10 merch packs valued at $400 and other fun prizes. All you have to do is sign up as a Red Royalty member and spend $5 on at a location near you or online.

Each week there’ll be new delicious deals and prizes to win. The week one deals have already dropped and they’re looking pretty tasty. You can get access to them via your Red Royalty account. The more you purchase, the more chances you have to win.

Spoiler alert: you can get 10 chicken nuggets for free, right now. Brb running to Red Rooster.

Terms and conditions apply. Visit Red Rooster’s Christmas in July to see all the deals.

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