Recettes

Peri Peri Sausage Rolls

This is a British sausage roll carrying a Southern African sauce, and it is worth being precise about which part comes from where. The sausage roll itself, seasoned pork in puff pastry, is British. Peri peri is the contribution from Africa, and it is a substantial one. Peri peri, also spelled piri piri, is the Swahili name for the African bird's eye chilli, a small and ferociously hot capsicum that grows wild across Mozambique, Angola and southern Africa. Portuguese traders encountered it in their African territories and built a sauce around it with garlic, lemon, vinegar and paprika, and that sauce travelled back through Portugal and outward again. Its association with grilled chicken in Mozambique and South Africa is where most people meet it. So this is a fusion piece rather than a traditional dish of anywhere, and it makes no claim otherwise. It is also a genuinely demanding recipe: the pastry is laminated from scratch, which means rolling and folding butter into dough across several chilled stages, and that is the bulk of the work. Shop bought puff pastry produces a perfectly good sausage roll and removes about ninety minutes.

★★★★★Les mieux notées

1 hr 45 minHardSouth Africa

Recette de Chef.donkey · Africook

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.

★★★★★Les mieux notées

40 minEasySouth Africa

Recette de Tshego Stone · Africook

Biltong

Biltong is air-dried cured meat from southern Africa, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Malawi, Namibia, Botswana and Zambia, cut into thick strips, cured in vinegar and spice, and hung to dry for days. It is made from beef and from game including ostrich and kudu. It is not beef jerky, and the difference is real. Jerky is usually cut thin against the grain, marinated in a sweet or soy-based liquid and dried with heat. Biltong is cut thick along the grain, cured with vinegar, salt and coriander, and dried in moving air without heat at all. The flavour and texture that result are quite different, and coriander is the spice that identifies biltong. Two things need saying about method. The first is safety: **this is a raw cured meat that is never cooked.** The 24-hour vinegar and salt cure and the drying are what preserve it, and both need to be done properly. The second is airflow. The meat hangs in a ventilated space with a fan blowing gently, never directly, because a fan pointed at the meat causes case hardening, where the outside seals before the inside has dried. Drying time varies with humidity and temperature, so it is tested by feel: any give means it is still wet inside.

30 minMediumSouth Africa

Recette de Nympha · Africook

Picnic Bread (From South Africa)

Picnic bread is a South African savoury quick bread, heavy with cheese, spring onion and bacon, bound with egg, and made to be eaten cold in a slice with nothing on it. The category matters. It is a quick bread, raised chemically rather than with yeast, which means no proving and no kneading. Everything is mixed and baked. That is much of why it exists: it is a bread that can be made in an evening for the next day without planning. Its association is with food carried away from home. It is described as an old recipe favoured by fishermen for their packed lunches and by schoolchildren, and the reasoning is visible in the recipe itself. It needs no butter because there is enough fat in it already. It holds together in a slice rather than crumbling. It does not dry out the way a plain loaf does. And it is dense enough that one slice is a meal rather than an accompaniment, which is exactly what you want on a boat or a long day out. The texture is unusual for a bread. It is moist, almost pudding-like in the middle, without being heavy, and the cheese keeps it soft for days. It is honest about what it is: nobody has ever pretended this is a low-fat recipe.

★★★★★Les mieux notées

55 minEasySouth Africa

Recette de FoodChef · Africook