Boerewors Brilliance

Meat is a vital ingredient of the South African lifestyle (Japan’s staple is rice, France’s is bread and South Africa’s is meat). In particular, meat cooked over the open flame. Don’t mistake it for a BBQ though. In SA… that shit doesn’t fly. If you want to grill meat…There is only the braai.

A vital component of the braai experience is boerewors. Boerewors is a South African sausage. Apart from maybe biltong, It is the most amazing meat experience that anyone can have. Needless to say, getting boerie in Japan is not the easiest task. Hell getting any meat worthy of being called meat is pretty hard in Japan.

There is an online shop here called TheMeatGuy. They sell a skinny sausage called un-traditional boerewors. It serves it’s purpose in a pinch but if it were on the boerie shelf at the local Pick& Pay (SA grocery) I doubt anyone would choose it. Don’t get me wrong… It is not bad at all and it is better than no boerie. But that stuff wouldn’t fly back home.

It was my 29th birthday. I wanted real wors. So we got pig intestine sausage casings from TheMeatGuy, mince from costco and I spiced it up appropriately. The cat and I then spent a whopping 5 hours packing the meat into the casings with a bizarre sausage stuffing contraption I made from PVC pipe.

People say good food takes time and effort. We certainly believe it. But it was so worth it. For the first time since coming to Japan I was able to eat REAL boerewors. Proper, fat, juicy, delicious carnivorous amazingness. Better yet, we could share one of the most quintessential South African foods prepared in a traditional way with our friends here. As you may well imagine. Nobody had eaten anything like it, and their appreciation for the food made all the hard work and effort worthwhile.
That said it was such that unless I can make a better sausage stuffer or get a mechanized one, W may not do this again for a very long time.

So how many of you are expats? How far do you go to get a taste of home in the country you now live in?

to be continued…