Boerewors spices

Boerewors spices

Well, if nothing else, at least I'll be the woman who brought boerewors to the Northeast.

On this beautifully cool, soft-rainy day my butcher calls me and says worriedly, We need your help.

Seems orders for boerewors are coming in from out of state thanks to my obsessive posting about my search for the elusive taste of the South African sausage - the ubiquitous and edible, if sinuous and slippery (might explain a few things), backbone of that nation, and about Los Paisanos as ground zero for its making in this hemisphere. Despite the recipe on my food blog seems people don't want to make their own spice mix. Huh. Tsk. Lazy.

A braai at No. 9 in Cape Town

At first I offered to grind all the spices myself, but then caught myself and thought, Hell, no! You know how long it takes to grind out a couple of tablespoons of pepper. Long! And to stamp fine all those singed coriander seeds? Long!

We just had a 6lb batch made up and it is the best so far. Now just a little more fat to the mix and I think we are there.

I have been tinkering at the spice mix for almost two years, starting with the recipe my university friend Vissie sent me from the badlands of Australia where he is a now fancy archaeologist. A lot more black pepper, a little garam masala, a splash more malt vinegar. Cloves, nutmeg. Allspice. A shovelful of coriander.  All the recipes I have found on the Internet are carbon copies of one another. Cut, paste, cut, paste. I, on the other hand (cue virtuous boy choir cathedral music), have sweated over the formula, doubting memory, interrogating the Frenchman, chewing suspiciously.

The recipe will now be emailed to Pedro at Los Paisanos. I am letting my baby go into big bad Brooklyn unsupervised, all rights to its future and education relinquished. 

It's for the good of the nation.