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6.6 lbs).

Boerewors recipe - the definitive South African sausage

A braai without boerewors is like Monet's house without the lily pond, or Klipdrift without coke.

Background

The name boerewors has a direct translation that means farmer's sausage, but that is only half the story. Around the mid eighteenth century the words Boer and Afrikaner became synonymous.Afrikaner means African and was referred to at that time as the "indigenous Afrikanders of European decent"(O.F. Mentzel in A geographical and topographical description of the Cape of Good Hope 1733-1741). These were the descendants of the Dutch and French settlers that arrived in the Cape from 1652 until 1689.

So this is the sausage of the Afrikaner. And since the time the word boerewors was first used, it seems that every cook had developed their own boerewors recipe. The boerewors that is popular today contains beef, pork, diced pork fat, coriander seeds and cloves as a given. The pork had to be a recent addition to the boerewors recipe, because in the past small farmers only slaughtered pigs in winter, and the wors was made all year round. Before the addition of pork, beef fat was used.

The ancient origins of the sausage is somewhere between France and Germany - the French using diced bacon in their saucisse and the Germans of Frankfurt had a sausage for grilling that contained coriander.

How to recognise good boerewors

Good boerewors is truly delicious. It is a high quality sausage made from good cuts of meat, minced, mixed with diced pork fat and spices including coriander and cloves. It is slowly grilled over the embers in order to melt the fat so that it coats the meat granules. Sausage on the braai grill is not pricked, but eventually the skin will become porous with the browning of the sausage and the excess fat will leak away. (When cooking boerewors in a pan, better results are achieved by pricking the sausage with a fine needle). A good piece of boerewors has a crispy outside and a loose, almost dry crumb that becomes succulent in the mouth.

Enough about that - if you are interested in more thoughts on boerewors, read what C. Louis Leipoldt, South Africa's equivalent of Brillant-Savarin, had to say about it here. He aslo gives another boerewors recipe.

Classic boerewors recipe

Time

This boerewors recipe will take one-and-a-half leisurely hours to make 7.5 kg of sausage with a manual meat grinder, or 50 hurried minutes with an electric grinder. It helps to have an interested assistant/co-chef (give any title, but get someone to help), because it is hard to feed the grinder and guide the sausage with only two hands.
15 - 20 Minutes on the grill.

Feeds

15 big-bellied Boere standing around a braai drinking brandy and coke, but with some additional meats and side dishes later on. If you do not have 15 Boere on hand, the wors freezes very well up to 2 months. You can also make less (just reduce the recipe accordingly), but 5 kg validates the exercise.

Tools

To prepare this boerewors recipe:

Meat grinder and a grinder plate with 9mm (3/8 inch) holes and stuffing tube.
Knife.
Plank.
Table with clean surface (or clean plastic cover) to clamp the grinder and spread the meat.
Flat, wide container that fits between the grinder and the table to catch the sausage
Pestle and mortar or electric spice mill.
Sift.

To cook the sausage:

A basket grid. This avoids the breaking and puncturing of the sausage when it is on the braai.

Fixings

You will need the following for the classic boerewors recipe:

5 kg	beef	11 lbs
1 kg	pork	2.2 lbs
1.5 kg	pork fat	3.3 lbs
	whole coriander	9 tbs
	freshly ground cloves	1 tbs
	freshly ground nutmeg	1 tbs
176 ml	wine vinegar	3/4 cup
	fine salt	4 tbs
	freshly ground black pepper	1 tbs
250g	thick sausage casings (pork intestine)	1 cup

Putting this boerewors recipe together:

Cut the meat into chunks roughly 1 cm x 1 (.5 inch x .5). This facilitates two things - you can spread the spices evenly over the meat and the meat does not get pulped when you mince it.
Dice the pork fat.
Roast the coriander (till light brown) and cloves in a dry pan before you grind it up - this releases a wonderful flavour in the spices.
Crush the spices in the pestle and mortar and sift it to remove husks and bits. You need to end up with 3 tbs fine coriander.
Spread the meat in one layer over a clean surface and add the spices and seasoning evenly.
Put the spiced meat in the bowl, add the vinegar and gently work it through the meat with your finger - do not knead, it changes the texture of the end product for the worse.
Mince the meat.
Gently mix the diced fat with the minced meat.
Remove the grinder plate and mount the stuffing tube.
Rinse the sausage casings by letting the tap water run in the one end of the sausage casing. This is fun, the casings fill up like magician's balloons. After rinsing squeeze out the water by gently running the lengths of casing between your thumb and forefinger.
Wet the stuffing tube of the grinder and carefully push the casing onto the tube. When you get to the end, tie a knot in the casing and you are ready to stuff it!
What comes next need a bit of skill, but you will gain it rapidly, as it is not really nuclear physics or advanced acrobatics. You have to feed the sausage casing with your hands as the meat comes out of the tube, shaping the sausage, making sure it is not too loose or packed to densely. This is where it helps to have a side-kick (for two reasons - it certainly makes the work simpler and you can blame this person for any mistakes - for instance, shake your head when the casing breaks and with eternal patience say: "The meat is coming out too fast/slow/irregular etc."). ]
Keep the sausage in as long lengths as possible - you will see why soon...
When it is finished, stand back and admire the coils of sausage with a feeling of genuine accomplishment - you have completed the first part of a delicious gourmet sausage. People who eat this will admire you. You will admire yourself. This is boerewors.

Fire

Grill the sausages about a hand-and-a-half's width over a solid bed of hot coals.
Turn regularly as the sausage browns so that it does not become too hot (see below).
Keep the sausage in a long coil - this accommodates the melting fat to spread through the length of the sausage and not explode to the outside. What makes sausage explode (which is perhaps why the Brits call their bangers) is when the juices in the sausage get to boiling point, form stem and has nowhere to go except through the casing.
Take it off when ready (if there is anything left - this usually gets "tasted" of the grid until there is nothing left). It is a dish that can wait in a hot place while you prepare other foods, it will still taste great.

Simplified boerewors recipe