Claire Keeton shares a recipe she tried with some friends for fresh bread on the braai

My friend Professor Lynn Morris, pictured, is an internationally respected HIV scientist, who runs a vaccine and drug-resistance lab in Johannesburg. Her cooking equipment in the field could not match her sophisticated lab equipment, but she brought the same precision and creativity to making a meal of Stuffed Bread Sticks (using a recipe from Justin Bonello Cooks . For Friends) in a campsite in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve, Botswana.

The freshly baked twisted bread turned out to be too good to stuff with boerewors as we had planned, so instead we ate it with a mixture of salsa made by photographer Marianne Schwankhart (tomato, avocado, spring onion and green pepper) and pesto, with roasted butternut on the side.

You'll need:

• Several longish sticks
• Fillings of your choice

For the basic bread dough you'll need:

• 4ml sugar
• 10ml dried yeast
• 100ml warm water
• 400g flour
• 4ml salt
• 60g butter
• 2 eggs
• Sunflower oil

Method:

First activate the yeast. Mix the sugar, yeast and warm water together, then sprinkle a tablespoon of flour on the top and leave in warm spot for 10 minutes or until frothy. Sieve the flour into a bowl, add the salt and then, using clean fingertips, rub in the butter.

"Next, beat the eggs lightly with a fork and add the yeast mixture. Make an indentation in the flour, pour in the yeast-and-egg mixture and knead it well until you have a soft, pliable dough. Brush the dough with sunflower oil, place in a big bowl, cover in clingwrap or a damp tea towel and let it rise in a warm spot for about 40 minutes or until it has doubled in size. Knead the dough one more time and you're ready."

Lynn then tore off fist-sized pieces of dough, flattening them into "cord-like snake shapes" with her fingers as the recipe instructed. She created spirals of the dough on greased sticks and cooked them over medium coals on the wood fire, until they slid off smoothly.