#bush bread

HEY GUYZ GUZZWHUT?

IT'S GLOBLIN - GUBBLIN -GHURBIN-....wait I got this...

GOBLIN WEEK! :D

My favourite!

And this year the goblins will be making you DELISHUS FUD.

This chap is making bush bread! inspired by my partner @scifer who went camping in the snow recently :

By Nachoman-au - A digital photograph taken by myself., CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=482468

Bush bread is a campfire baked bead made from native seeds, nuts, and roots by Aboriginal Australians that is sometimes compared to the damper made by white colonizers, which is made with wheat. Both are unleavened, though damper might be left out overnight and might have collected natural yeast.

Source: https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20210228-who-were-the-worlds-first-bakers

Traditionally, bush bread was women's work, with some groups practicing this until the 1970s in Central Australia. The process includes collecting the seeds, such as millet, spinifex, wattleseed, or kangaroo grass, depending on what is seasonally available, as well as nuts and roots. In the Kimberley region of Western Australia, harvester ants collect and husk the seeds, leaving the seeds around their nests, especially after the dry season. Women in this region collect these seeds.

Source: https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20210228-who-were-the-worlds-first-bakers

Once the seeds are husked and ready, they're ground into a flour with a millstone, which some groups refer to as 'mother and child'. These stones may go back as far as 65,000 years, making the Aboriginal Australians the earliest people group to begin baking. The oldest stones were found in the Northern Territory in 2015, with some in Cuddie Springs, New South Wales, dating to at least 30,000 years old. These stones have signs of being used to make flour, supporting the researcher's belief that they were used to make flour used in baking.

Source: https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20210228-who-were-the-worlds-first-bakers

It was long thought that the native crops used to make bush bread grew naturally, but now it's understood that the Aboriginal people managed the plants with careful tending and controlled burns so that even the most arid areas were able to flourish. This predates the Neolithic revolution by thousands of years. This was destroyed when Aboriginal people were pushed off their land and cattle were brought in. Many non-Indigenous Australians view the native grasses as weeds, making it difficult to reintroduce them, even though Aboriginal foods are becoming quite popular.

Source: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-45075838

Another reason for the focus on Aboriginal agrarian practices is that they are drought and heat tolerant and native to Australia, which also gives them particular significance to the Aboriginal people, especially women. It's also thought that returning to more traditional food sources would benefit the health of everyone.

There are many variations on damper, many of which have added some type of leavening, such as self-rising flour, baking powder, or yeast, and many of which have been adapted to cook in the oven. If you wish to try some, here are some recipes:

Cooked on a stick over fire via Edible Communities