FOOD BABBLE: BOERIES!: Who makes the best boerewors? Tell us all about it

I find that the best boeries comes from your small-town butcher. Boeries? If you’re asking what that is, you aren’t South African, and most likely haven’t visited.

Even a tentative foray into any South African city or town will result in you meeting at least one South African who will ask you if you’ve tasted “boeries” yet, and most likely offer you some.

Who to ask about the relative quality of local butcheries, when a town has more than one? Pop in to the bar at the town’s hotel, order a drink and get chatting to whoever’s there. The barman if nobody else is in. Or just stop somebody in the street. 

Or pop into the local tuishnywerheid – that’s the “dit en dat” (this and that) sort of little shop where cakes, koeksisters and biscuits made by local home bakers are sold. Each home cook has a number, and all their wares are labelled by that number, so you can know who made your cake. The tuisnywerheid tannie (or oom) will also know who the best butcher in town is.

The proud small-town butcher – who most likely farms near the town as well – will pride himself (or herself, it is not exclusively a male domain) on his great, great oupa’s boerewors recipe, which most likely goes all the way back to the Voorktrekkers. A wagon wheel with a family story to tell may well linger somewhere on the werf out on the farm.

Since I returned to Cape Town I have been bereft of good boerewors. There isn’t a single supermarket brand that I’ve tried that comes within a Karoo mile of competing with any Karoo wors I’ve eaten. Maybe there’s a great one out there that I just haven’t found, and if so please let me know.

The very worst shop-bought was one marketed as “champion wors” and branded as being favoured by the Bokke. Well, they’re great at rugby but if that’s what they think is good boerewors they should keep to the field. It wasn’t merely bad. It was execrable.

Wherever you live in South Africa, there is boeries to be had, made or bought. There will be farmers and townies who make it in their own kitchens or sheds. There will be prized recipes in yellowed old recipe books on shelves long overlooked.

Take a foray over to this beautiful read about boerewors by my colleague and friend Louzel Lombard Steyn. Louzel wrote the piece for me in 2019, when it was the very first thing she wrote for the very young TGIFood platform, all of seven years ago.

And she chose to write about boerewors. Louzel wrote, in 2019: “Like a meat-filled thread connecting the dots of our combined pasts, boerewors nods to our colonial influences but celebrates the ingenuity of the first people who put together this unique blend of beef, fat, coriander seeds and vinegar.

“So highly considered is the boerewors here that the Health Department in 1990 set out regulations to determine what can – and cannot – be classified as the “real makoya”. It reads like Biblical scripture... and so it should.

‘Boerewors shall be manufactured from a mixture of the meat of two or more animal species [including beef, goat, sheep and pork] and shall be contained in an edible casing. It shall contain a minimum of 90% total meat content and not more than 30% fat content. There shall contain no offal except where such offal is to be used solely as the casing of the raw boerewors. It shall contain no mechanically recovered meat,’ among other things.”

It shall. But does it? Well, not every curl of boerewors sold in every South African store is worthy of the old health department requirements.

Read Louzel’s whole story for the Lombard family boerewors recipe.

Now please tell us where you buy, or used to buy, the best boerewors you can remember eating in your life. A small-town butcher? A friend whose boerie was, or is, just better than the rest? A big-city butchery who just knows how to do it right? The boerewors at a farm stall you popped into somewhere?

Could there even be a boeries brand in one of the supermarket chains that could take on the best from a great small-town butchery?

Or do you, like the Lombard family of Cradock, have your own treasured family boerewors recipe that you’re willing to share with us? Or, if not the entire recipe, tell us some of its secrets and explain why you think it is so good?

Are you a home boerewors maker or a butcher in your own right who has a recipe that you reckon could be the best?

We’re not going to announce any winners – that’s not what this is about. We want to share the wealth of boerewors knowledge – spread the Boerie Love. And there’s room for more of that in this world. Tell us. DM

To buy a copy of Tony Jackman’s Retro Karoo Food (Penguin Random House) signed by the author in gold, send an email to him at tony@dailymaverick.co.za
Or buy it through the Daily Maverick shop.

Tony Jackman is twice winner of the Galliova Food Writer of the Year award.