Weekend Argus (Saturday Edition)
There is no sin in this realm
Karoostew
HOPS AND smoke. Malted temptation. I went online in search of a recipe for braai bread, found one, effected some wicked sorcery to change it fundamentally, and came away with a pot of pure, unadulterated sin.
By the time the bread had baked for an hour and I’d removed the lid, I could sense satan on my shoulder and for some moments wasn’t quite sure whether the curls of smoke around me emanated from the braai coals or were the harbingers of hell. Had I gone too far this time?
There was a movement in the back yard. A dark, cloaked figure hovered and appeared to take a step towards me. Was that a scythe he held in his claw of a hand? I saw it, I swear. But the shifts and shuffles of a crescentmoon Karoo night can play tricks on one’s vision.
Bacon and beer. The smokiness of the pork rashers combined with the maltiness of the ale. Add the smoke from the braai fire, some herbs plucked from the garden and an onion to sweeten it up, and you have the makings of something special to go on the side of the fire as you prepare the chops and wors. Something with the ability to send you into the fiery furnace or to have choirs of angels on a heavenly mission to charge down and pluck you up to cook for celestial beings. For now, maybe this happenstance recipe was a little bit of heaven on Earth, if we can just keep the claws of those darker entities off it.
Fiddling with recipes is not quite like fiddling with nature to make evil things like bombs, or tampering with the genetic makeup of fruit and vegetables or infecting the planet’s natural systems with chemicals created by pallid, unsmiling white-coated scientists in laboratories deep within the Alps.
The website on which I had found the original recipe on was Food24 who in turn attributed it to Go/Weg magazine, but that was only the starting point. It was probably beamed down to them from God anyway. In fact, that recipe was for a beer and cheese loaf wrapped in bacon. I dropped the cheese and added onion and rosemary, but kept the beer and the bacon and the cooking time instructions, hoping that it would work out given that I had fiddled with the recipe.
But I reckoned it would be fine to replace Cheddar cheese with a finely grated smallish onion, and rosemary needles are only flavouring. So, Food24 and Go/Weg’s original recipe is duly acknowledged.
But hey, I doubt if I’ll ever make it their way, as I have already been given instructions to make this a standard of our future braais. That’s how good it was.
In the end, I survived the occasion. No grim, cold hand clutched me from my bed that night, although I could swear that at one point I heard the distant chorus of happy angels beyond the nearby koppies.
It is wonderfully easy to do. Just line up all of your ingredients on the kitchen table, grab a big bowl, and find a suitable cast-iron pot. A potjie (not too big) will do, but my heavy oven casserole did the job just as well.
Sift the self-raising flour into the big bowl and stir in the sugar and salt. Make a well in the centre and pour in the beer and cold water. Add the egg, then combine quickly with a big wooden spoon. It will be a wet, sticky dough. Finely chop the small onion and the rosemary needles and put them in, combining well with the wooden spoon.
Grease the inside of the cooking pot, and line it with streaky bacon, with the strands hanging over the sides. Spoon in the dough and arrange the bacon strands over the top.
Cover with a lid and cook for one hour on a potjie stand or on two layers of bricks, with coals constantly beneath it. If you use only one layer of bricks, there will be too much heat and it will blacken the bottom of the loaf. Put some coals on the lid as well.
Turn out on to a wire rack. Rip off chunks of the bread by hand and serve with real butter and whatever’s just been cooked on the braai grid. Toast the angels, not the other guys.