Ranger Nick

Hi Ranger Nick? How are you doing?

I'm good, just having a bit of a spell, it was a pretty big day.

What have you been doing today?

It was a late night last night, getting things organized. We've been at the Yamba River Markets and it's a four o'clock start from here.

Ok. That's early. How did it go?

It's a little bit quiet this time of the year. I think that's pretty common for businesses, it is starting to pick up, and hopefully before Easter, we'll get a few holiday makers who will pick things up for everyone.

Great. I wanted to start off by saying congratulations on being a finalist in the environmental business category of the Australian Small Business Awards, that's amazing. What led up to that for you?

There was a nomination, which was the first early implication that I had anything to do with it. Then the next thing I knew about it, we were in the finals. They contacted me and let me know about all that. It was very, very surprising. But we've certainly been busy with all of the different shows and expos up until the five letter, C word, let's say, and then all the ups and downs over the last two or three years. The entertainment industry just hit a wall, bang. Up until then we were flat out busy. We were doing 25 to 30 gigs a year, which took us from one end of Australia to the other. There's quite a bit of travel, but a lot of fun on the road. I guess I look at it a bit like getting paid to play.

I have watched some of the videos of you entertaining, and you are educational as well as funny. You are veryentertaining, but you are sharing a message with people and helping them learn how to cook simply in the outdoors. Is that what it is?

Mostly. The focus is camp cooking, camp ovens. It's certainly hit in a big way. A lot of people have taken it up and started realizing the benefits of it. It certainly takes a lot of the stress out of it, because you don't spend a lot of time hanging around the kitchen. It's set and forget type techniques, focusing on camp ovens and cast iron. I love cast irons. It's just beautiful stuff to cook with and a very healthy surface as well to eat from and cook with. The main focus is how to control heat. People get in a bit of flap about it, I suppose. But I try to get it into people's heads that it's not really something to get wound up over or a big deal at all. It's just about learning that heat source.

That's interesting. We do a bit of camping, my partner and I, and we do have a camp oven, but I feel like we're a bit hit and miss with how successful we are. What are some top tips for handling the heat?

A common thing people say is that it's all trial and error and you finally work it all out. But probably the biggest tip is don't stress out over it. There's certainly nothing to stress over. And have someone else to blame. I guess you've got your partner to blame. But look, one of the biggest tips I can give anybody is, learn about that heat source. If we go back to the years where the newly wed bride got dragged out onto a station, shoved in front of the combustion stove and old wood stove, and she'd burn the bottom out of every single pot and just make a mess of everything. But over time they worked it out, and I can tell you I've had some of the most wonderful meals out of country kitchens, the food's just amazing. She got good at it and then they introduced electricity, so everyone had to have an electric stove. Well, guess what happened to all the pots again? And then we had gas and now we have induction. With every new heat source, you have to get used to that heat source. Once you can identify what your coals are going to do, and keeping in mind that there are different timbers that burn at different heats, and hold coals differently, once you get familiar with that heat source, it takes all the guesswork away. Does that make sense to you, Jo?

Absolutely. It does make sense.

Well, you are going to shine, and you won't have to blame the old fella anymore.

I suppose it depends where you're camping as well and what kind of wood you've got. What's the hottest burning or the best kind of wood to use?

You mean like God's gift to those who cook?

Yes, that's right.

Gidgee would have to be right on the top of that list. Gidgee is an Acacia and Acacia is a species that has the most flowering plants in Australia. Acacia are right up high and gidgee is right on the top of that list. Then there's Waddy. There are only three stands of Waddy that fringe the Simpson Desert and for that matter about mid-Queensland to mid-New South Wales, there's a band of Gidgee that runs along the fringe of the Simpson Desert. There's quite a bit of it out there and you just have to learn to identify that and you pick it up pretty quick. Most people you talk to say, oh look, we don't have any trouble with the camp oven, but we went out around the fringe, around Charleville or Cunnamulla or somewhere like that, picked up this timber and burnt the bottom out of every pot we got, it was so hot. Once you pick it up and use it, it's not hard to identify what it is that you're using. There are certainly a lot of hardwoods in Australia that produce great coal.A good all rounder is Ironbark, and coolabah is way up high on the list.It's fantastic. So from one end of Australia to the other, if you're familiar, you'll get good results. In Victoria, they have things like the Murray River Red Gum. It's one of the better timbers to use down there. And of course in that dry band that runs around near Mildura, you get the old Mallee root. It's really good to cook with and produces those nice hot coals that hold and burn right down to a white ash. You know how they're going to perform, all the guesswork is gone.

Right. I feel as though I always put in too much liquid, but I saw you putting in silverside with vegetables and it didn't look like there was a lot of liquid. How do you do it?

About 10 years ago, there wasn't really anyone roasting silverside. But our corned meats, believe it or not, was one of the things that our early settlers used to use in the camp oven. If you think back a couple of hundred years when we didn't have refrigerators, what we'd do is we take a piece of meat, bury it in rock salt, it'd dehydrate, and it'd get very salty. Before we cooked it, we'd have boiling water and we'd chuck it in there for 10 or 15 minutes just to draw the salt out and rehydrate the meat. Then it'd be placed into the camp oven and roasted. These days it's all cryovac and the salt that's in that packet is all the salt that the meat can absorb. So, if it's done old school in a butchery where they have it in brine tanks, they pump it full of salt and that can get very salty and its probably a good idea to put it in hot water to draw that salt out before you roast it. But generally what's in cryovac packets can go straight into your camp oven, throw your veggies in. Keep in mind there's 80% water in vegetables and meat. There's a lot of moisture already in there, so if you don't overheat the base, you can set that and forget it. Once your coals have burned down, your meal's ready. So an hour per kilo, just like any other roast, youll have a lovely roast silverside with a wonderful taste and you haven't boiled the guts out of it and had to put things like vinegar, honey or bay leaf to give it any flavour.

That's definitely on the list for Easter camping. Thank you. I saw you putting coals on top and I know we've tried to do that in the past, but I don't know, it always gets really messy. Is it best to put the coals on top as well?

I would highly recommend not overheating the base. If you overheat the base of any pot, you just burn the bum out of it. So putting heat on the lid is where you get that nice brown. If you're baking or roasting or trying to do your crackle, the lid is a good place to put a lot of the heat. If you need more heat, it's better off up the sides than underneath.

If you refer to what you do in your kitchen at home, it's going to give you a good indicator of what your meal's doing in the camp oven. I say to people, cook with your senses. But I say our six senses. Do you know what the sixth is? It's common sense. Start using your common sense and utilize the knowledge you already have and using your kitchen on a daily basis.

Okay. So let's cook a roast in our kitchen at home. For an example, when we cook a roast at home, we turn the oven on, preheat it to 200 degrees, chuck your roast in, let it sear for a half an hour, three quarters of an hour, and then turn the oven down to around 140, something like that. 120 and let it cook for an hour per kilo. Pretty common practice. Now the beautiful thing about a camp oven is that it doesn't have a knob on it, so you can't turn the heat down, but once we place coals onto it, what's happening to those coals is they're burning down. So it's losing heat itself. I don't often preheat the oven, I just dump everything in because it's easier to handle and set it into the coal. It hits temperatures well over 200 degrees in that searing time. So the first half an hour is a good time to keep a bit of an eye on it. And what we are doing is we're going to look for things that are happening or we're using all of our senses. We're not just looking, but if we were watching it, what might we be watching it for? What would it do in the kitchen at home? I'm seeing steam coming out from under the lid and I get the pleasant aroma of my food cooking. What might I hear? A hissing sound. I'm not lifting the lid to check and letting all the heat and moisture out. I'm just setting it and forgetting it. That's a technique I like to promote and use. It gives me more time out of the kitchen and on the riverbank fishing.

So, it's about using your senses and the knowledge that you use in the kitchen every single day that you're comfortable with and quite confident with, so you might as well introduce them to the outdoor fire. When we're seeing steam, smelling the food, we're hearing a nice constant sizzling and its doing everything that the roast in the oven at home would do. Let's just leave it alone and go fishing.

Of course, we also have touch. Now I'm not going to recommend to anybody to touch an oven that's going to hit temperatures over 200 degrees. I certainly don't recommend that. However, it's exactly what I do. There are options around that. If you preheat the oven and baking a damper is a good example. Let's say we put a piece of baking paper into the camp oven, what happens to baking paper in my oven at home? It will discolour. What a wonderful indicator. So then we have a nice heat there for baking. The oven's a nice temperature. Common sense. Some people get spit and they flick it on the side of the oven. If it goes and jumps off, well that's a very hot oven, but if it just goes and slides down, then it is probably not hot enough for roasting. If you don't like the thought of flicking a golly on there, then click your fingers and just stick a little bit of water on the side and it'll give you a similar indication. Personally myself, I started cooking when I was a small boy. I'm from a large family. I'm the baby of 10 and if you wanted to see dad, you were up the paddock working with him. So midday lunch, we would light a fire, sometime mid-afternoon someone had a job of going and setting a camp up for dinner and then you'd get your sorry tail back to the job, ring barking trees or digging post holes. So you weren't to hang around the camp. You had to quickly control that heat or you had a lot of cleaning to do and cop the flack from everyone in the camp. What I learned to do was put the back of my knuckles or the back of my hand, my fingers just touching the side of the oven. If I could touch it and not hold my hand there just less than a second, just touch and go, whoa, that's pretty hot. That's a pretty good indicator. I'm reaching the right temperatures. But if I could hold my hand there for maybe a second or two, its not quite hot enough. I don't recommend touch. There are other things you can do, but that's a technique that I picked up from when I was a small boy.

Right. You mentioned damper and I know one of your cookbooks has 101 different kinds of damper, which seems like a lot of damper. Do you cook that in the camp oven as well? I saw in your Guinness Book of Records damper that it was rolled in foil. Obviously that wouldnt have fitted in the camp oven. What's the best way to do damper if you're not doing 153 metres?

There was foil involved just to keep ash off it. Damper is one of the simplest things to do. It's a great place to start if you're a novice or a learner, having your first go. A bag of flour is only a couple of dollars so we can burn that. Its only glue, it's only flour, salt, water. Its no big drama. The world record damper that we cooked actually weighed just under 400 kilos, 393.2 kilos when it was cooked. It was 153.02 meters long. And what impressed me the most is it was all one colour. I know that's pretty consistent heat. I was very chuffed by that.

When you cook a damper, set your camp oven and preheat it then throw a couple of hands full of flour, maybe a quarter of a cup of flour in the bottom. If you can brown that flour and get it to hold, it's a perfect temperature for baking. If the flour is brown, your baking will be brown. That's one of the best ways I find to cook a damper. Now if you set it like that, preheat the oven, brown your flour, and you leave that in there for, and I'm talking about half a kilo, maybe up to a kilo of flour, and around about 20 minutes you'll have a cooked damper. If you leave it for another five minutes, it'll get a nice brown crust. If you leave it up to about half an hour, you're going to have a nice, thick, crunchy crust. And that's how I like damper. So from 20 to 30 minutes, you should have a nicely cooked damper. If you can pick it up and give it a tap, it'll be hot, but pick it up and give it a tap, it'll sound like a ripe watermelon with a nice hollow sound. If you simply just grab a stick, a skewer, a knife, something like that, and poke it straight into the middle of the camper, into the middle of the damper when you pull it out, if it has dough, then it's not quite cooked. Again, we're going back to knowledge that we already know and we're applying it to the open fire.

Great. Thank you. You've cleared a lot of things up. What's the best way to look after the camp oven?

It's a bit like a hot plate on your barbecue. The more you use it, the better it gets. There's a process or a bit of a chemical reaction, I guess, for lack of a better description. I'm not real studious, I've spent most of my time on the outside looking in when I was at school. But the process is polymerization. Any fats like butter or oil or, or suet or anything like that, when it comes to a point where it begins to smoke, it will polymerize and what that does is it puts a layer on the camp oven and seals it off and it will actually eventually give you a nice non-stick surface. I've got a skillet here that I use most days. I've had it since I was eight years old. My mum bought it for me when I started Boy Cubs. Its had a lot of abuse, but over the years I've learned to control the heat and it's like a non-stick surface now. I can fry an egg and just tip it off. Wow. The more you use it, the better it'll actually get. If you do have an occasion where you've either overheated it and lost that seasoning or polymerization or you've put things like tomato or an acidic fruit in there and it may have taken some of that off, don't stress out over it, just keep using it. Give it a very thin layer of oil or fat or whatever you like to use and just re-season it a couple of times and it's ready to go again. You'll have this piece of cookware for a lifetime, and more. I've got ovens here that are over a hundred years old.

Wow. Good to know. And tell me about your curry kits. Do you use those in the camp oven as well, in stews I presume?

Most certainly. Whatever you cook in your kitchen at home, anything, even pavlova, you can cook in a camp oven. The curry kits were a great example of getting backed into a corner with the five letter C word. I like to call it that because I don't like to be rude. The five letter C word was a real kick in the butt for me because it was three years without an income. In that time I went, holy heck, what am I going to do? I happened to be sniffing around looking in cookbooks all the time as I do and right at the back of the bookshelf, I found this dusty little book that was grandma's recipes. And she happened to be an in Indian grandmother. I started going through it and picked out a few recipes to play with. And they were so good. Better than what I can get at a restaurant. Then I sourced some great Australian product. It's all Australian product, which might seem a little bit strange, I guess Indian curry from Australia. But I sourced the best quality spices I could get my hands on and put these blends together and simplified the cooking methods. You can certainly tailor them for the camp oven around the fire and you will be eating better than restaurant quality meals with no preservatives. All Australian product, simple cooking techniques and better than restaurant quality. How's that sounding Jo?

That sounds delicious. I can't wait to get out camping.I've read the way you are described: guru of Camp Oven cooking, bush cooking and environmental etiquette. Tell me about environmental etiquette.

I certainly have an affinity to the outdoors. Over the years, I've gone from being a labourer to having a nasty back injury and wondering what I was going to do? I actually went to school and studied at TAFE and I ended up in the tourism industry and got into a position where I was 2IC in the environmental department for Sky Rail International Tourism Management. That was a great place to work. And a lovely place to visit if you're ever in North Queensland. One thing led to another in a chain of unfortunate events, and I ended back up back down in my hometown Miles in southwest Queensland. Lovely little spot. I ended up jagging a job with education Queensland at an environmental education centre. The affinity that I had with botany and the environment around me, I got to study and get paid for. It was absolutely marvellous having that connection with the outdoors and I had to take a different look at it. When you look at our forefathers, there were certainly some horrible practices with farming and felling trees and all that sort of thing. Now I have much more appreciation and try and pass that appreciation on to people that I meet. It's nice to be able to talk to people and I think laughing is learning and especially working with the school kids in an outdoor environment, its good to get them laughing and having a joke about all these things then they took home a lot more information. I like to throw things in about different species and trees.Gidgee itself actually known as stinking wattle. The reason why it's known as that is right before a storm it gets a horrible smell of cat wee. That's one of those things and it's kind of amusing. It's irrelevant, but it's quite interesting and it gets people in. I try to focus on, okay, while we're out and about, let's not just look for a pretty place to camp, but notice what timber is around because we want to be cooking and we don't want a hard job. Because some timbers, especially along the east coast, you'll get a nice bed of coals, but as soon as you shift those coals and put them on the oven, 10 minutes or so, they go out. They lose all their heat.It's very frustrating and it's a lot of work trying to keep coals going. So it's a good example of getting to know what's around you and taking more notice of sights, the sounds, those sorts of things. People are so caught up in their day-to-day rituals or grind that they forget to turn their senses on when they get out camping and they miss so much: songbirds when you want to listen, wild flowers when you want to see. And also leave it as you found it. There's an environmental saying, I'm sure everyone's heard it, but take nothing but photos, leave nothing but footprints. Every time I drive away from a campsite, I always like to look back on it and I get a lot of pride when I can look back and say, gosh, you can hardly see that I've been there except for an 18-inch round patch on the ground where I've lit a fire.

And then we get into fire. Thats another big issue. A lot of people have the fear of fire and it can be very scary and dangerous, I have to say. So learning to control that environment and knowing where you actually can light a fire within national parks or freehold land or caravan parks, wherever you're traveling and like to stay, free camps, all that type of stuff. Let's leave it so that we make minimal impact. Using good timber is a good example. I don't need a big heap of wood if I've got good timber, so I don't need a roaring fire. And I'm leaving nothing behind. Its a practice that I pride myself on. The less I can see where I've been, the better I feel that I've impacted, or haven't impacted the environment.

Instead of revving and skidding in your four wheel drive, well how about let's make sure we got traction so we are not driving with our right foot so much. Sometimes it's unavoidable, but just little things like that. Take a little bit of notice of what impact you do have while you're out there and try and minimize that.

I think that's really good advice. We are lucky to have so much in our back garden, so to speak, even in the big cities. It's easy to get out into some really beautiful places and as you say, it's important to respect that as well. Thank you, Ranger Nick. I've learned so much from our conversation. All the best for the 28th of April.

Actually I'm not sure that I'll be able to attend because we have a fair bit on starting April. Well be heading down to Corryong for the Man from Snowy River Festival and that's a biggie. But I'm certainly looking forward to seeing how I went and hopefully I'll end up with a trophy from it.

It's a great achievement already and I feel very lucky to have got to have spoken to you today. I hope you can put your feet up and relax now.

Absolute joy, Jo, it's been a pleasure talking to you as well. Thanks for the time on the air and I guess all I can say is I'll see you when the mud's dry and hope to see you around a campfire one day. I'll let you cook if you like.