What makes a great jaffle?

I think it’s time that we talked more about the mighty jaffle.

For hundreds of years people have been putting fillings between two pieces of bread and putting it all in a cast iron jaffle maker and sticking it into an open fire. Ok, perhaps I made most of that up, but it could very well have been true. I’d very much like it to be true.

When we’re in Eucumbene we cook over fire- I’ve told you that before. Part of that involves a jaffle-off…it’s a competition of sorts.

This year, inspired in part by a challenge on Masterchef, I put some serious research into it. I started with a poll of sorts- on Facebook. Some seriously good suggestions came up. We had (amongst others):

The roast lamb dinner jaffle
The breakfast jaffle
The eggs bennie jaffle
The banana cheesecake jaffle
The banana and nutella jaffle
The apple pie jaffle
The peking duck jaffle
The plastic cheese and peanut butter jaffle…yes, really…apparently late at night…

I spread my survey wider- and opened most meetings at work with the question: ‘what’s your favourite jaffle filling?’

The key findings from all of this research was clear: everyone has a favourite jaffle filling…and pretty well anything can go into the middle of one- as long as cheese is involved.

To keep it simple for the campfire, we came up with some rules:

The jaffle had to be able to be eaten in one hand
The jaffle had to involve either leftovers or basic esky or pantry staples
The jaffle shouldn’t be accessorised with pointless garnishes
The jaffle shouldn’t involve the pre-cooking of any filling for the express purpose of being used in the jaffle (see the rule above about leftovers)
Any sort of bread or bread like product is permitted in the jaffle
The jaffle can be cooked either directly on the fire or on the fire plate.

So, what did we come up with?

On Friday, the Lyons Den wowed the crowd (ok, their kids and us) with their ham and pineapple pizza jaffle and their meatlovers pizza jaffle. For me, though, the star of the day was the peking duck jaffle. Seriously yummy. The use of Turkish bread for the peking duck jaffles was a master touch.