G'Day Bruces... I honestly had no idea what to do for this one, so I thought I'd just go for tradition and make Aussie Damper, as traditionally as I could... so here goes.... a little bit of a history lesson too....
An Australian Cowboy, is called "Stockman," or a "Jackaroo". Their job was to muster cattle on farms, or indeed to go Droving, a term for taking cattle from one distant place to another... or indeed, A Drover himself had a heard but no land so would live a nomadic life across the outback. The food they had was very basic, and this included Damper.
Damper was often eaten with jerky and to be truthful, it's not a lot different than what you call "biscuits", which are an American Cowboy thing. What you call "cookies", we call "biscuits" ... but I digress.
Damper was thought to be given the name because its cooked in the damped ashes of an open fire, so that's what I did as best I could...
Firstly, made the damper dough... mixer was already out soo... WTH, bugger tradition...
I cleaned out my ol weber copy which has been nothing but a stand for my charcoal chimney for the last 2 years! I lit a pretty big fire with some charcoal to start, and then some old rotten Acacia wood I had collected... being exactly the type of firewood you'd find out in the scrub, if you were a Jackaroo...
I put the damper on a CI pan. I actually don't have a CI camp pot... I better get one!
I let the coals burn right down...
And the pan on top
As expected, it started to burn a bit on the bottom, but this is what it's supposed to do!
So moved the coals to the side and put the lid on the kettle to finish off. By the time it was done, there was not many coals left...
Then inside, Plated with the Jerky... now fella's I'm very excited about this latest batch of jerky... I never took any photo's of the prep, because I wanted to refine things a bit before I let the cat out of the bag... but with this batch, I know now I have it right... this is Jerky from heaven!
Then we broke the bread... (TD Photo.... Stockmans Lunch)
It was about here I just got a little tingle...You know when you realise that this is SOMETHING SPECIAL.... When we cut the bread, the whole family just went .... Ooooooh. Right up till then, I didn't even think I was gonna eat the damper... to me it was just a history lesson, till that point. Now I realise why it's a tradition... because it's absolutlety beautiful...
So, we fanged the lot!
Goes well with Scotch....
Thanks for looking!
Cheers!
Bill