The ooray, or Davidson Plum, is a native delicacy that’s tart in flavour, vibrant in colour, and is gaining traction in the culinary world. Baking Business caught up with Clarence Bruinsma, one half of social enterprise Bush To Bowl, to learn more about the native fruit.

Can you us about the process of growing the Davidson Plum and how they’re harvested?

It’d be nice to introduce the audience to the name for the Davidson Plum, which is ooray. That’s the Bundjalung language [from Northern New South Wales] name for the plant. We’ve partnered with a farm up there who have had these plants growing there for years, and are now able to harvest those. We also grow the plant and we’re establishing other farms as well.

The ooray grows on the stems of the trees, which are 10m tall. They’re very odd dinosaur-looking, very old plants. It’s very different to see the fruit growing. It literally looks like the ooray is attached to the stem of the tree.

As the weather starts to cool off into that Autumn period, the fruit will start dropping from the tree You can harvest that straight from the ground.

That plum can come with no seeds, which is a blessing, or sometimes with one or two [seeds]. And you generally can slice it down the centre – once you understand where the seeds lie – and you can pop the two seeds out. From there you might turn it into a puree, or you might use the whole fruit pieces in a pie or if you’re making a chunkier sauce.

We take the whole fruit and get it powdered and have that freeze-dried powder, which is a vibrant purple colour, like magenta. You can put it on top of ice cream or yogurt – anything where you get that white background and it has a bit of moisture in it. The colour just pops.

Adam Byrne and Clarence Bruinsma

Is the fruit quite versatile?

It is a very sour, tart fruit. I will just eat it – you kind of build a taste for it and want to eat the plum as it is. I think over time and as you build an understanding of the flavour notes, you then get to appreciate that tartness. You start to really enjoy the flavours.

If you wish to, you can add different sweeteners and you can pair it with other fruits, like apple or other naturally sweet items. You can get some beautiful sweet or savory-type dishes out of it. For me, you know, it can range from using it as a jam to putting it within it a pie or using it in that powder form. It’s quite versatile, and the colour is just to die for.

How many ooray can you harvest in a season? Is it a high producing fruit?

In terms of harvesting it produces quite well. You’re getting 10kg to 20kg off a tree; it’ll produce quite a good yield. It’s just that there’s quite a bit of a life in between the young plant and a plant that’s fruiting. You’ve got five-odd years before you got a good yielding plant.

Are there any special considerations that need to be made with ooray? Do they need to be prepared a certain way before you can cook with them?

Think of it as your typical introduced plum. Obviously, you’ve got to make sure the fruit is ripe, so if you look at a plum and it’s green and it’s hard [it’s not ready]. When it’s ripe it starts to soften off.

 Can you tell me a bit about Bush to Bowl?

So, Adam [Byrne] and I are two local Aboriginal fellows from Sydney’s Northern Beaches and we connected at a mob catch up. We started talking about his love of plants and my love of native edible foods and bushtucker – we just started chatting about growing plants.

He was a landscaper and wanted to try more of these plants in his garden that he was installing. Then we realised that it was quite hard to source them, and so we started growing them ourselves. But quickly the conversation about why we believed in this started, and it came down to changing the health of Country. Changing the way in which people think and interact with the plants, the animals, the waterways.

We started learning more about the pollution caused by runoff- and much of it was from food, the mileage it takes for food to get to people’s doors or onto their plates. And we just realised there’s actually more than just the care for Country; we realised there’s a lot of pollution and a lot of rubbish that happens as a result of the food that we’re trying to get into our mouth.

[We thought] well, we can change that. If someone is growing a couple of plants of their own in the backyard, they then create an ecosystem that’s great for local habitat. But then if they decide to use that as food they also then change the food mileage in terms of the food on their plate.

The picture got bigger and bigger as our understanding of it grew. There’s the social, emotional, and wellbeing side of things. For us it’s all come from the plants. If we can help just one person in the family to think differently about the food they’re consuming, to plant a native plant in the ground in their backyard, or start a conversation at the dinner table around, ‘Hey, how’d our food get here? Are we consciously eating, growing, looking after country?’ in the same conversation, then that’s a win.

Ooray growing on a tree

Bush to Bowl is more than a nursery, you also run workshops and classes. Can you tell us more?

There are four arms to the company, which is the nursery – so growing the plants that people can purchase and grow in their own backyard. We also install purposeful, mostly food gardens or learning spaces, or cultural healing spaces. Then we grow the foods and we have a couple of dedicated farms to do some wild harvesting -that’s the food that we provide to the general public, but also to restaurants, catering companies, and bakers who use it to make amazing food.

Then we do the workshops around cooking with the foods, tasting the foods, growing the plants. So we kind of cover everything from learning how to grow it to providing the food at the back end of it for people to use if they can’t grow it.