Defining Australian food is difficult. How do you distil a food culture built on imported cuisines and the produce available across our vast landscape?

It may not be easy to box up, but Australian cuisine does have a place in the culinary universe, thanks to the chefs and producers whose dedication to working with the land while honing their craft has led to a unique sense of place. This global acceptance of Australia as a serious food player has encouraged more Aussie chefs to look inwards. Even a globe-trotting Nigella Lawson said her top food discovery of 2018 was finger lime, an Australian native. “I had finger lime for the first time in Sydney and it was very exciting,” she said. “We can get them in the UK if you want to spend as much as a new car, but it’s one of the joys of travelling to have something you can only get in situ.”

While some of us may have tried finger lime at Quay, warrigal greens thanks to Kylie Kwong, or dabbled in a little Davidson plum chutney, wild native ingredients remain a largely unexplored frontier.

Brae chef Dan Hunter says it’s the chef’s job to bring a cultural understanding of what to do with unfamiliar ingredients so they are delicious, not gimmicky. His latest collaboration with Melbourne chocolatier Koko Black brings native botanicals and single-origin craft chocolate together, a combination he says works because the intensity of flavours are on par.

“The face-screwing tartness of Davidson plum rounds out the deep cocoa fattiness of dark chocolate, while the snap of caramelised whipstick wattle seeds brings texture to the smooth creaminess of milk chocolate,” he says after experimenting with more than 50 native ingredients.