Recettes

Classic South African Kota

A kota is a quarter loaf of bread, hollowed out and packed with fried food. The word is township English for quarter, and that is the whole description: bread cut in four, the soft centre pulled out, and the cavity filled with chips, polony, russians, viennas, cheese, egg, atchar and sauce, then capped with the bread that was removed. It belongs to the townships of Gauteng, where it is sold from small takeaway windows and eaten in the hand without a plate. Kota shops compete on what they will fit into a quarter loaf, and the size of the fill is a large part of the reputation. It is cheap, it is a complete meal, and it is built for people who need to eat between one thing and the next. Atchar is what makes it South African rather than generically stuffed bread. The pickled green mango relish, oily and sour and hot, came to South Africa through Indian indenture and cuts the fried starch that dominates everything else in the cavity. Kota is often described as a version of bunny chow, and the two are related without being the same: bunny chow is Durban Indian, a hollowed loaf filled with curry, and kota is a Gauteng township form filled with fried items. They share an ancestor and are not interchangeable.

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40 minEasySouth Africa

Recette de Tshego Stone · Africook

Vetkoek (South African Fried Bread)

Vetkoek is a yeasted dough, flattened by hand and deep-fried until it is crisp outside and soft as bread inside. The Afrikaans name translates literally as fat cake, and the isiZulu and isiXhosa name is amagwinya. It is one of the most widely eaten things in South Africa. Its lineage is Dutch. Fried yeast dough came to the Cape with Dutch settlers, and vetkoek belongs to the same broad family as the Dutch oliebol, the Caribbean johnnycake and Mexican sopaipillas. What happened to it afterwards is what makes it South African: it became township food and street food, sold from stalls and windows across the country, and its usual filling, curried beef mince, is itself a product of the Cape's Indian and Cape Malay influence. It is eaten both ways round. Split and stuffed with curried mince, cheese, polony, tinned fish or slaw, it is lunch. Split and spread with syrup, honey or jam, it is a sweet snack with tea. Neither version is more authentic than the other. Note that this page covers plain vetkoek. The filled version with beef mince curry has a separate page on this site, and the two are meant to complement rather than replace each other.

45 minEasySouth Africa

Recette de FoodChef · Africook