Food & Places- Bobotie from South Africa

South Africa is not known as a country with a wealth of culinary delights like, say, Thailand. In fact, I’ve heard travelers complain about the food being bland. Even some guidebooks suggest that you certainly don’t visit SA for the food.

But I disagree, considering South Africa’s incredibly rich cultural heritage it only makes sense that there is a curious and exciting mix of food to be discovered by anyone looking for a good meal.

And to back-up that statement I bring you… Bobotie!

Bobotie, (the tie pronounced like Bet-tie) is a delicious Cape Malay dish filled with flavors, fragrances and textures and anybody calling bobotie dull has no taste buds. This dish brings together the fruity sweetness and vinegary tart of fruit chutney, the sexiness of cinnamon, and the spiced-goodness of curry and turmeric. Biting into bobotie you go through a layer of crisp glaze, followed by egg custard before finally getting to the richly flavored meat. Mmm.

There are quite a number of bobotie recipes out there, but they all combine basically the same ingredients; meat, bread, milk, eggs, onions, curry, turmeric, and fruit chutney. My version of bobotie actually does not make use of fruit chutney, I use apricot jam instead and add just a little bit of vinegar or lemon juice for the tart flavor.

The best thing to do when making this most certainly non-bland South African dish is to experiment until you find the right balance of flavors for your tastes. This is what I usually do when I make bobotie. So I’m leaving you with more of a guideline than a recipe, the rest will be up to you.

Find:

500g ground beef

1 chopped onion

1 slice bread- white or brown

1 cup milk

2 eggs

turmeric

curry powder

bay leave

pepper

salt

sugar

chutney or apricot jam

vinegar or lemon juice

olive oil

Make:

Preheat your oven to about 180C and prepare a deep oven dish. Soak the slice of bread in the cup of milk. Heat the oil and add the curry powder and turmeric and then the onion. Add the beef and brown. When the beef is browned, mix in the chutney or jam, a little vinegar, and sugar, salt and pepper to taste. Take the slice of white bread and squeeze out all the milk, keep the milk as you will use it for the glaze and custard. Crumble the bread into the meat mixture and pour all of this into your oven dish, push a bay leave into the top. Bake for about an hour, until everything has set.

For the glazy-custardy part you mix the eggs with the milk and pour this on over the meat about thirty minutes before it’s done.

Suggestions for bobotie:

- bobotie is best served with some fragrant yellow rice, but I ‘ve used dahl and brown rice and it works just as well

- you can let your imagination run wild with adding some extras, some people add raisins, dried apricots. Almond slivers adds a lovely texture to the meat.

- make it and say to yourself “Mmm, South African know a thing or two about making a great meal!”

 

Beskuit

I grew up with this baked and dried-out delicacy always being present in our home. As a child, my mother would bake new batches almost every week to keep up with my constant demand for beskuit in the morning. We took them on trips to the coast, Kruger Park, Namibia and even on our first trip to Europe. Whenever I was visiting South Africa, while still living in Taiwan, my mom would become frantic with worry during the final days of my visit that she would not be able to have enough time to bake me some beskuit to take back with me.

Beskuit is the Afrikaans word for rusks. A traditional South African baked item I believe has its roots in the Italian biscotti. Besides the similarities in name and texture, it also needs to be baked twice and you can play around with different kinds of beskuit.

My favorite is still my mother’s tried and trusted recipe I grew up on. I got it from her while I was living abroad to attempt my own version. This, my first time baking it in Bangkok, has possibly been my most successful. Whether it was using plain yogurt instead of buttermilk or whether maybe I just finally got the other ingredients and temperature right I do not know. But I think it came out great.

To make beskuit you need to get:

3 cups all-purpose flour

1/2 cups whole weat flour

1 and 1/2 tablespoons baking powder

1/2 cup white sugar

1/2 cup brown sugar

250ml plain yoghurt

250 grams butter

1 teaspoon salt

Make:

Preheat the oven to 180C and grease a baking dish. Sift the dry ingredients together and put aside. Melt the butter and mix in the yogurt. Combine the wet and dry ingredients well and pour into the baking dish. Bake for 45 minutes. Let it cool on a wire rack and then cut it into squares. Place the squares onto the wire rack and dry in the oven until dried through, about two hours, at 100C. The oven should be open just a little while it is drying out.

Beskuit, in my opinion, is best enjoyed with a cup of fresh coffee for breakfast, or afternoon coffee or any other time actually. I love it.

Suggestions for beskuit:

- use bran instead of wholewheat flour

- my mother uses buttermilk, but I could not find it in stores here so I used yogurt instead- worked like a charm

- margarine also works if for some reason you do not want to use butter

- beskuit is great with sunflower seeds or dried fruit added to the mixture. Yum!