Braaibroodjie and Boerewors: Cooking Out

Braai is an Afrikaans word that is often translated into English as “barbecue.” That’s barbecue in the backyard sense–a cookout, some barbecue sticklers might insist–with beer and fire, meat and sides, friends and family gathering together in a social event that might be a special occasion, or might simply be another Saturday. It’s a party, more or less, an informal one with some simple expectations built into Afrikaner culture: bring whatever you want to drink, bring some meat to throw on the fire, and don’t tell the host he’s doing it wrong.

Afrikaans, derived from Dutch, has a similar word for sandwich as its parent language–broodjie vs the Dutch broodje. Thus “braaibroodjie” is a barbecue sandwich of sorts. But again, that phrase–barbecue sandwich–brings with it, for Americans in any case–a set of expectations. A Texan might think of sliced beef brisket in a bun with a drizzle of sauce; a North Carolinian, chopped pork with a vinegar sauce and slaw; an Alabaman, chicken with white sauce. In any case it will be the sandwich’s filling that’s barbecued, and barbecued in the American sense–slow-cooked, over indirect heat, with smoke.

At a braai, it is the sandwich itself that is barbecued–barbecued in the broader sense of being cooked over the fire. The most typical recipe for a braaibroodjie is this: white bread, buttered on the outside, filled with shredded cheddar cheese, sliced tomato and onion, and a South African brand of chutney called Mrs. Ball’s.

As our friend Marinus has pointed out though–and as he will describe in his own piece on Braaibroodjie that will be landing on this site before long–there is more to this sandwich than the simple veggie melt many writeups describe. A Braai may follow the simple formula of FIRE+MEAT+BEER but the person putting together sandwiches for the Braai–which are saved until the end, when the meat is almost finished cooking, and quickly browned in grill baskets over the coals before serving–often likes to showcase their creativity. They will at least have a single signature recipe that they swear by.

After reviewing machine-translated versions of these two lists of Afrikaans Braaibroodjie suggestions that Marinus provided–IDEES VIR BRAAIBROODJIES and Planne Met Braaibroodjies–I put together a rather ambitious list of terrific-sounding ideas I wanted to try:

• “Bacon, blue cheese, pistachio nuts and honey.”
• “Spread butter, inside and out, spread Bovril on both sides, now pack your onions, tomato, cheese and grill as usual.”
• “Biltong, Mozzarella and Cheddar mixture with chutney as ‘butter.'”
• “I do a Hawaiian one. Cheese, pineapple, ham and garlic.”
• Apricot jam with onions and cheese seems popular
  • “Onions and apricot jam. Very nice. Can also add cheese.”
  • “3 types of grated cheese, some apricot jam on the cheese side with very thinly sliced ​​tomato and onions, salt and pepper.”
  • “Best ever! Butter, real butter, thickly sliced ​​onion rings, apricot jam, plenty and plenty of grated cheese.”
• “Onion marmalade, Mozzarella cheese and basil leaves on an English muffin.”
• “2 frozen pizzas, place together toppings on the inside, grill the same as you would’ve grilled sandwiches.”
• “Banana with bacon and peanut butter”
• “With Camembert, avocado pear and caramelized onions”
• “Crispy fried bacon, pineapple ring and sweet chilli sauce”
• “Ham, Cheese and onions with English Mustard”
• “Salami, mozzarella cheese, onions and tomato”
• “Cooked boerewors cut into thin slices, fried onions and cheese”

That is only a fraction of the ideas expressed on those two pages, which represent only a sliver of the many possibilities, and it was already far too many. Braaibroodjie must, after all, be cooked in a braai, and in order to have a braai, I would need some other meats on the grill, and one meat that almost universally must be cooked during a braai, it seemed from my research, was a type of South African farmer’s sausage called boerewors. I managed to find a recipe in English and scaled it down to a smaller batch for an initial attempt.

I should have made the full-sized batch.

Boerewors uses a combination of beef and pork but the primary spice is coriander seed, with a little bit of warm pie spices providing some depth of flavor. The floral, almost citrusy brightness of coriander accents the fatty, smoky flavor of the rustic, coarse-ground sausage well, and the smoke from the mulberry wood I used to grill the meats added a delicate sweetness of its own.

Building the Braaibroodjie

For this braai, rather than using my little charcoal grill or my slightly bigger propane grill, I elected to put a large, circular grate over my 40″ metal firepit and cook with wood. I built the fire with mulberry logs left over from removing an unwanted but persistent tree from our backyard 2 years ago, and cooked both boerewors and bacon over the fire. Mindy, getting into the spirit of the braai, decided to make SPAM and pineapple sliders, and grilled slices of both in grill baskets of her own.

My grill basket was just the right size to make 6 sandwiches at once. At 3/4″ in depth, it was a little shallow for building sandwiches. It would be better suited for cooking pork chops, perhaps, or cheap steaks. But I made do.

In one row, I made two of the chutney/onion/tomato versions, and one with the butter and Bovril. Bovril is a concentrated liquid bouillon that, in the US at least, is available only in the Chicken flavor, and I liked the idea of adding that savory character to one of these sandwiches. In the other row, I chose to make ham, mustard, and onion; bacon, pineapple, and sweet chili sauce; and apricot jam with onion, all with cheddar cheese. A South African would use shredded cheese but for ease and neatness, I used sliced cheddar instead.

With the boerewors almost done, and most of the bacon already removed from the grill…

…it was time to put the sandwiches on as well.

They did not take long to brown–in fact the corners began to blacken in short order–but the radiant heat of the fire made short work of heating the contents through as well.

Because of the relative shallowness of my grill basket, they were a bit difficult to extract–I will look for a slightly thicker one for future sandwiches. I was able to carefully dislodge them from the grill basket’s mesh, leaving a gridwork of divots across both sides of each sandwich. The bread was crisp-surfaced and ranged from tan to a deep near-burnt brown in color. Some of the wetter fillings did eventually soak through but for the most part these sandwiches were structurally sound, ideal for picking up and eating out of hand while chatting up your neighbor at a cookout, though I would certainly recommend having napkins handy.

It’s Eatin’ Time

The classic braaibroodjie, that of the Mrs. Ball’s chutney with cheese, onion, and tomato, was a hit. I wasn’t sure what to expect from Mrs. Ball’s chutney–Branston pickle has taught me to temper my expectations of the word “chutney”–but it is a sweet, mildly spicy condiment along the lines of a Major Gray chutney but with apricot and peach rather than mango. The Extra Hot version gets a bit more fiery with the chilies but is still sweeter than it is spicy. Both are complemented well by the pungent and savory combination of onions, tomatoes, and cheddar cheese. The version that replaced the chutney with Bovril, on the other hand, leaned heavily into the savory side, but the buttered bread was not enough to keep the bouillon concentrate from soaking into the bread–shredded cheese rather than sliced might have done a better job of trapping the thick liquid in its matrix. While I appreciated the extra-savory nature of the sandwich, the balance between sweet and savory offered by the chutney version was preferable.

Similarly, this braaibroodjie, containing crisply grilled bacon, a pineapple ring, and a sweet chili sauce offered that juxtaposition of sweet, savory, and spicy flavors. The Mae Ploy brand Thai-style sweet chili sauce I used may not have been precisely what that Afrikaner was calling for in her recipe but it complemented the crisp and smoky bacon well, adding some spice and additional sweetness to the firm and tart/sweet pulp of the pineapple ring.

Ham with mustard, onion, and cheese was probably the most straightforward of the sandwiches I made, though the pungency of the thin slices of onion and hot English mustard as well as the crisp-edged bread with its tinges of sweet mulberry smoke gave it dimension beyond the typical ham and cheese sandwich.

Perhaps the most surprising sandwich to me was the combination of apricot jam with onions and cheddar. I am no stranger to the delights of complementing sweet fruit-based flavors like an apricot jam or an apple pie with the slightly bitter, salty edge of a medium-sharp cheddar, but I was surprised how well onion integrated into that combination, especially after the sandwich was cooked and the onion softened. The resultant flavor was not far off the Mrs. Ball’s chutney, in fact.

In addition to these sandwiches, we also enjoyed some of my homemade boerewors–which should have spent a little less time over the fire but was still delicious–and bacon, and Mindy’s mini-sandwiches of grilled SPAM and pineapple on Hawaiian slider buns.

Overall, our braai was a great success, and is something we hope to repeat on a regular basis in the future. We liked having the firepit going for reasons entirely foreign to the concept of a braai though–it was great for us all to be out there, Mindy cooking her contributions while I cooked mine, Ian with a marshmallow on a stick if he chose. Call it backyard glamping if you wish rather than a braai, but I’m currently looking for a slightly more sandwich-appropriate grill basket and I’m going to use shredded cheddar instead of sliced next time.

Not to mention that there are more recipes yet that I’m excited to try. I’m especially sad that I wasn’t able to do the bacon/bleu cheese/pistachios/honey version this time around. Braaibroodjies may have a standard form, but seem to be a sandwich type that encourages creativity as well, and it was fun to get to exercise that creativity together as a family.