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What if you were able to obtain rich, superior antioxidants, simply by seasoning your food?
This is a privilege many Australians can enjoy, but don’t take advantage of nearly enough.
Mountain pepper or Tasmanian native pepper (Tasmannia Lanceolata) is a shrub that grows in the alpine regions of Tasmania and southeast mainland Australia. It thrives in the type of cool, wet habitats that can be found in mountain gullies. The native plant produces aromatic leaves, and during the autumn months, the female species develops small fleshy blackberries on its distinctive reddish stems. Both the leaves and berries can be dried and used as a cooking spice, and when milled, the hardened berries make for a terrific substitute for conventional pepper (often sold as pepperberry).
Dried and crushed mountain pepper leaves can be used to flavour sauces, chutneys, pastas and even sweets like ice-cream. Source: CSIRO/Science Image
It’s why Indigenous people use whole peppercorns or crush the spice into a paste, and apply the pepper to toothaches or sore gums, says Trish Hodge, a Tasmanian Palawa woman and the managing director of Nita Education, an Aboriginal cultural education program. “I guess when you’re on fire, you’re not going the think about anything else."
Mountain pepper has not only served Indigenous people as a flavouring agent for food over generations, but by and large, as a traditional medicine. Due to its high antioxidants, mountain pepper has been documented as a treatment for a variety of illnesses from stomach aches and colic, to skin disorders and venereal diseases. The tonic, made from ground berries, leaves and bark is also recorded as being used by early European settlers to treat scurvy.
With potent antioxidants, four times more powerful than the beloved blueberry, mountain pepper’s health benefits are just as useful today as they have been over centuries. Antioxidants are linked to helping with diabetes and Alzheimer’s disease, autoimmune and cardiovascular diseases, but more recent research highlights mountain pepper’s unique antiviral properties.
Dr Ian Cock, senior lecturer in Biomolecular and Physical Sciences at Griffith University told SBS Food, “The berry inhibits the growth of many pathogenic bacteria, protozoa and also has some limited antiviral activity. It also has good anti-cancer activity against multiple cancer cell lines.”
Also striking: the plant’s antibacterial properties. With antimicrobial components, mountain pepper has been found to inhibit the growth of food poisoning bacteria and prevent food spoilage, which Dr Cock's research demonstrates.
“I talked to a group of bush food enthusiasts – not scientists – about several Aussie plants as both flavourings and preservatives, a person who was a butcher approached me and asked for ways to extend the shelf life of his sausages,” Dr Cock says. “I suggested trying the pepperberry and lemon myrtle in combination. He later reported to me that it doubled the refrigerated shelf life of his sausages. That, of course, is anecdotal rather than empirical, but still, it is impressive. We have tried it as a fish preservative and see similar trends.”
The berry inhibits the growth of many pathogenic bacteria, protozoa and also has some limited antiviral activity. It also has good anti-cancer activity against multiple cancer cell lines.
Despite being an ‘Aussie superfood’, mountain pepper is a rather small agricultural industry. It can take several years for the trees to begin to fruit and only half the plants bear fruit anyway, so pepperberries are a prized crop (luckily, the leaves are more commercially viable).
Within Australia's small industry, significant quantities of mountain pepper end up in Japan to be used as a flavouring and fragrance for wasabi paste. It is also used to flavour beers and spirits in Australia and abroad, such as SOBAH's non-alcoholic Pepperberry IPA, and other drinks, too.
Commercial pepperberry growing helps make the spice accessible. Because, unlike some other bush foods that are easily foraged, Trish Hodge points out that mountain pepper can be trickier to source.
“Mountain pepper is alpine and you can damage a lot of the rest of the environment by going to get [it],” she says.
“A lot of the stuff is in national parks or heritage or protected areas, so to actually go and gather it is quite difficult." She warns that there are penalties if you do the wrong thing, too.
Today, their increased retail availability means mountain pepper and pepperberry are becoming increasingly popular in cooking, too. Pepperberry ice-cream, anyone?
