Many years ago, Kiwi nanas were very adept at camp cooking and could rustle up a bit of billy bread to feed hungry mouths. It’s quite common to share food at my campground and one thing I love to make is pizza bread, which we throw on the barbecue, then sprinkle with salt. Everyone is so impressed that you can cook with yeast while camping but it really is very easy – just buy granulated, not Surebake, yeast.
My friend at the camp, Esther, makes a type of bread we call “doughboys”, something many Maori nanas would have made for years. I hope you enjoy these recipes and give them a go if you are camping this summer.
Billy bread
3 cups flour
3 tsp baking powder
1 tbsp golden syrup
Enough milk to mix
Mix all ingredients together in a large bowl, adding enough milk to make a dough.
Place dough in a greased closed tin or billy. You can then place this in the embers of a beach fire or barbecue, covering the tin with coals for about half an hour (depending on the heat of your coals). Or you can cook it in a conventional oven in a cake tin at 190°C for about half an hour.
Another old cookbook of mine says to roll bits of the dough around sticks and then hold them over the fire, turning so that you get little buns on the end of the sticks. You can then fill the holes left by the sticks with butter, jam or cheese – just delicious.
Pizza bread
1½ cups of water
½ tsp sugar
2 tsp dried yeast
Salt and pepper
4 cups flour (I use
high-grade)
4 tbsp olive oil
Mix together the water and sugar until dissolved, then sprinkle over the yeast. Leave for 10 minutes in a warm place, until the yeast starts to froth.
Sprinkle salt and pepper over the flour and stir with a whisk to get some air into it, or sift.
When the yeast is bubbling, add the olive oil to it, then pour it into the flour mixture. Mix to a soft dough but do not knead. Set aside in a bowl for an hour in a warm place, covered with a tea towel, until the dough doubles.
Roll out pieces into the size of a pizza and put on the barbecue or grill. When cooked, brush with olive oil and sprinkle with salt.
Doughboys
4 ½ cups warm water
3 tsp sugar
4 tsp dried yeast
6 cups flour
3 tsp salt
Oil for cooking
Put 2½ cups of warm water in a jug and dissolve the sugar in it. Sprinkle the yeast over the top of the mixture and wait until it starts to bubble and smells strongly like beer.
Pour the mixture onto the flour and salt, then add the remaining 2 cups of water.
Knead the mixture, then leave to double in size. Punch down and knead again. Flatten and cut into squares. Leave to rise again for 30 minutes, then fry in hot oil – Esther uses rice bran oil, which has a high smoking point.
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