Damper – baking the easy Australian bread

Besides my passion for traveling and discovering new places, I am also into food. I enjoy eating good food and I think it is very important to know what you eat and not to just buy or order without thinking about the ingredients and nutrients. That is why I have been trying to cook and bake more recipes by myself in the last months. I was a bit skeptical at first. Me cooking? I was not famous for preparing delicious meals. The opposite was the case. Something went always wrong when I invited people to dinner. I was really unexperienced with spices and how to use them and therefore, I concentrated on oven baked vegetables with salt and pepper or baking pizza (that’s what I have always been able to do, because my mother taught me!). Maybe, I will share the recipe next.

Times have changed and I cook and bake new meals every week. The food tastes so much better and it feels good to exactly decide by myself what to eat and what ingredients to use. Today, I want to share a really easy one for a bread. It is traditionally Australian and called damper. It was once made by adventurers, explorers and bushmen in the Outback (at least this is what I found online about it).

The Ingredients

500g flour
2 teaspoons of baking soda
2 teaspoons salt
1 tsp sugar
250 ml of water
40 g of butter
80 g of olives (black or green, whatever you prefer)
40 g of capers

The Instructions

Preheat the oven to 200°C.

Put flour, baking soda, salt and sugar together in a bowl and mix it. Add the butter in some small pieces and mix everything again. Add the water slowly and start to knead until everything becomes a solid dough.

Add capers first and knead it in. Do the same with the olives. At this point, the dough may be quite wet with all the olives and capers. If it feels too wet, add a handful of flour.

Shape the dough into the form you want, e.g. round or oval. Place it on a baking tray and put it in the preheated oven for 30-35 minutes.

The bread is good to eat until the bread sounds hollow when tapped on the bottom.

It tastes really great when served warm!

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