African Breese Biltong

Around Vancouver in 52 Restaurants > Africa > South Africa.

Vancouver has a pretty decent selection of East African restaurants (which I will certainly get to telling you about now that we’re touring though Africa), but Matt and I went on a road trip to Pemberton last weekend which just happened to take us past African Breese Imports in North Vancouver. African Breese, a South African import shop, specializes in all things South African including soap, BBQ sauce, candy and Rooiboos tea. Labels are often in English and Afrikaans and even with familiar brands like Cadbury chocolates, the products are utterly foreign. We walked around in awe at all the wonders but we were here for the meat.

Biltong is a cured meat, a softer kind of jerky, made with beef and pork and sometimes ostrich and other meat (my Oxford Companion to Food suggests zebra). It’s spiced with coriander seeds, cut into strips and dried for days, at which point it becomes preserved and perfect for storing.  Unlike jerky, however, the meat is still relatively soft and the fat hasn’t been removed, which makes it much more palatable in my opinion. The biltong at African Breese has been on my list since it appeared on Vancouver Magazine’s List of things to taste before you die, but I didn’t realize there were so many kinds! Traditional, hunter and spicy blends filled the display case, along with some ”chili bites” and droëwors sausage, also in several flavours. Chili bites looked to be smaller, dryer slices of meat than the biltong, whereas droëwors are long, slender pieces of meat, similar to a peperoni stick or dry sausage. We didn’t try the chili bites but we got one each of karoo, traditional and spicy droëwors and a bag each of hunter and spicy biltong.

I thought I would like the spicy biltong best, but the hunter is complex and sophisticated and I couldn’t stop eating it (although that may have just been the salt). Coriander seed, fennel and sugar play against each other to be sweet-savoury-salty and we were sold. The salt and black pepper flavours linger on the palate. Matt describes it as being “very ‘meaty’ – more so than most jerky – without being offensive or overwhelming”. The spicy variety is similar in flavour to the hunter, but with a nice initial bite of heat sits somewhat separate from the rest of the flavours.

The droëwors were gone too fast to take specific tasting notes, but they were similar in flavour to the biltong while being an even more interesting texture. They are made from thin boerwors (farmers’) sausage but I could have sworn that they were hand-rolled. Lumpy sticks of beef and pork meat wrapped in a dry casing with pockets of both air and fat, each bite was different. And delicious. The karoo was my favorite and differed subtly in spices from the traditional. They are the perfect meat for a journey and although they were designed for quite a different sort of journey, they were no less enjoyed on the Sea to Sky.

All that dried meat called for some liquid, so we had also got some water, ginger beer and this delightful bitter lemon soda (with quinine!) to wash it down. I am in love with this drink and will probably be drinking it for the rest of summer, hopefully with a stick of karoo in the other hand.

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African Breese Imports
1054 Marine Drive, North Vancouver