The Bunya Nut Episode

When it comes to stuff that can kill you, Aussies just have to do everything bigger.

Take the bunya pine. The cones it drops are like a foot in diameter, and you probably don't want one's 45 meter drop to end with your head. Those spikes on it are really sharp, too! So I made sure to "keep my bloody eyes open," as was suggested to me, as I went looking for some bunya nuts to cook.

Cones are plentiful enough, scattered around the base of the tree. If you pull apart the fallen cones, each segment contains a nut a little bigger than your thumb nail, the same way you can find pine nuts in large pine cones. Australians don't usually eat bunya nuts, but my wife had always wanted to try them, so we took an afternoon to experiment. 

If you're curious, Aussie kids don't, my wife assures me, have bunya cone fights.

Taking a few suggestions from the internet, we tried a few different ways of cooking them. One Aussie chef suggested that the whole cone be boiled, and the all the nuts inside would steam. A second author wrote that pine nuts should be roasted over a barbecue. We tried both ways.

The cones pull apart in scales

Each "scale" contains a nut. This one's not ripe enough to eat!

Ripe bunya nuts roasting on the barby. Where's the shrimp?

We found roasting produced a much more palatable flavour and texture. Bunya nuts taste a lot like pine nuts, even though, technically, a bunya pine isn't really a pine tree. The nut's texture is very starchy, kind of like a half-cooked potato. I suspect this could be because of three possibilities: 1) That's the way they are, 2) we didn't cook them long enough, or 3) the cones dropped before they were ripe. 

Peeling the cooked nuts

Ready to eat! The dark yellow ones are boiled,
and the lighter two are roasted.

I did find out that Australian aboriginal people traditionally bury the cones in mud to allow the nuts' starches to break down into sugars before they cooked them. That makes a lot of sense. Bunya nuts don't taste bad, but I think they'd be best as a flavour you add to something, not a stand-alone food.

Overall, I enjoyed the uniqueness of the bunya nut cooking experience, but I'm not about to sneak a handful for a midnight snack. Which is probably for the best since, apparently, they have small amounts of cyanide . . .