Australian caper farmers selling hard-won harvest to restaurants, home cooks for up to $50 per 250 grams

A wide-brimmed hat, knee pads and plenty of tea breaks are essential for Heidi Setchell while picking caper buds destined for plates in some of Australia’s high-end restaurants.

For more than a decade, she and her husband Dave have been growing capers, along with jujubes and dates, on their organic farm in Loxton, about 250 kilometers from the South Australian city of Adelaide.

But in recent years, the Setchells have had to work harder to meet the demand for the products of high-end restaurateurs.

While the finished product looks effortless and tasty on the plate, it’s a different story on the block.

Work hard to harvest

The harvest season for caper buds is in late spring and early summer, before they bloom into flowers and then into caperberries.

It is best to break off the pea-sized fruits of meter-high shrubs in the morning, before the sun and the UV index is high.

After a few hours of work, the two-liter blue ice bucket, which hangs from a lanyard around Mrs. Setchell’s neck, is slowly filled with the fruits of her intensive labor, which can fetch as much as $130 per kilo.

“We tend to pick the buds that are about 5 to 8 millimeters in diameter.

“If you go for real small capers, they are also very popular with chefs, but they are less than five millimeters in size and they take an extremely long time to pick.”

Despite demand exceeding supply, Setchell said scaling up is not a viable option.

“We’ve had a tendency to pay people to pick caper buds and you literally lose money if you go that route,” he said.

“It’s really just a matter of how many caper buds we can pick ourselves… before it’s worth it.

“We never run out of supplies, that’s for sure.”

Cooking with capers

So what is it about capers that makes them so sought after?

Alex Prichard, culinary director of Iceberg’s Dining Room and Bar in Sydney, said they worked so well in cooking because they were versatile and unique and helped balance the flavors of dishes.

A caper convert himself, Mr Pichard said the difference between imported and fresh Australian capers was stark.

He believes if more consumers had access to Australian capers they would be popular.

“People have a preconceived idea of ​​what the flavor profile of a caper should be,” he said.

“But when they try these (Australian capers) in our restaurant, they say, ‘Wow, I’m not used to that’.”

Catering for chefs

It’s this curiosity and question that led a Naracoorte couple to make the switch from garlic to capers, but they never expected that six years later they would be turning down requests from top chefs.

Liz Crowley and her husband Rob supply capers to high-end restaurants, mainly in Sydney and Melbourne, but also sell a limited number to home chefs.

“Unfortunately we can’t keep up, we have to knock back quite a few chefs,” she said.

Although demand continues to challenge the flock, the plant’s sustainability and limited water supply make it a good option for future farming conditions.

Brutal reality of harvesting

Adelaide horticulturist Brian Noone has been operating a wholesale caper plant business for almost three decades.

In 2002, he traveled to Italy, Spain and Morocco on a Churchill grant to study the ancient food, which he said showed the brutal reality of harvesting this niche ingredient.

“More than 50 percent is still picked from the wild, so people have to walk a kilometer to pick a kilo.”

Australian-grown capers can cost around $50 for 250 grams, while a kilo of imported capers can cost two to three times less.

Mr Noone said high labor costs in Australia made it difficult to compete with imports, but technology could provide a future solution.