Braaied deboned leg of lamb, lamb ribbetjies, lamb loin chops
You know you’re a serial braaier when you’ve moved to England and it’s midwinter but you fancy a braai, so you grab your friend Blaise, go to Sainsbury’s, buy a portable barbeque and head home to braai in the rain.
I might be a natural braaier, but neither Blaise nor I is, shall we say, mechanically minded. So while Di has been despatched to the kitchen to prep salads and wrap potatoes in foil, Blaise and I go out into the postage stamp garden – just two head-high walls on each side and a demonically smiling stone cherub beneath the hedge at the far end. Our home in Chichester was a three-storey Georgian terraced house, in that odd way the British have of living right on top of one another even though there seems to be plenty of available countryside in which to give everybody just a metre or two of extra space. So you get to know your neighbours rather intimately.
I was dismayed to find, on opening the box containing the new portable braai, that it was a kit. There were dozens of nuts and bolts and bits and pieces, and lengthy instructions in Japanese-English, saying things like “to make barbeque erection first place iron rod in upright pole” and “screw hard and fast assuredly”. An hour later, if a tad rickety, a portable braai we had, and the rain was merely a mist, so we lit a fire and billows of black smoke rose into the air and turned sharp left towards our architect neighbour Terry’s back garden. After some minutes we heard his conservatory door open and a second later Terry’s wide eyes appeared over the wall like Kilroy. “Oh, I’m sorry,” he said apologetically. “We thought you were on fire. Margeret,” he yelled, “tell the fire brigade not to bother. They’re just barbecuing.”
“Barbecuing!?” could be heard in the vague distance.
Braaing for Brits is something we did often there, and have been doing again in Cape Town for visiting family and the British boyfriend. Braaiing for us and Simon is like braaing for us and four extra people. He’s not greedy. He’s a discus thrower aiming to throw for Britain at the 2012 London Olympics. I feel it my duty to contribute to the cause, so when planning a family braai at the weekend I decided to do lamb on the braai three ways – deboned leg, marinated; loin chops with honey and mustard, and ribs doused in lemon and black pepper. I threw in an extra packet of chops, just in case. Good thing I did.
My favourite way of doing deboned leg of lamb on the braai is to marinate it for a day in equal parts of lemon juice and soy sauce with rosemary, mint, garlic and black pepper. Braai over very hot coals, turning every few minutes, until rare, then let it rest. Chops are too easily overcooked, hence burnt, dry and tough. Cook them over very hot coals, quickly, leaving them pink at the centre but with the fat nicely charred. I cooked them for a few minutes before basting them in honey and olive oil mixed with mustard and black pepper. And don’t be a wimp about eating the fat.
Ribs are best cooked for longer on the outer edges of the braai grid, as there’s denser, more compact meat, fat and tendon to be cooked through. Once they’re done, dip them in lemon juice and black pepper. With all of the above, salt the meat halfway through the cooking.
End a braai with my “cheat peppermint crisp ice-cream”. Buy a two-litre tub of vanilla ice cream, and five peppermint crisps.
Keep one peppermint crisp aside in the fridge. Bash the other four (use a rolling pin, Daisy) while still in their foil packets. This will create chocolate chips and shards of peppermint crystals. Soften the ice-cream for half an hour out of the freezer, pour into a large bowl, add the shattered peppermit crisp and stir thoroughly. Freeze.
Cheat Peppermint Crisp Ice-cream
To serve, place two or three scoops in a bowl, and garnish with the fifth peppermint crisp, similarly shattered.
It’s a bit like that meccano braai, I suppose – ice cream in a kit, and much more impressive once it’s been put together. I should package and market it. “Just add annihilated chocolate”.
First published in The Good Weekend, Weekend Argus, January 2010
About tonyjackman
Tony Jackman writes about food, wine and restaurants, witty and irreverent newspaper columns on almost any subject, and also dabbles in playwrighting and painting in watercolours and pastels. He cooks up dinners, lunches, breakfasts, braais and brunches for his weekly food column, and is developing this site into an extensive resource of information about Western Cape restaurants.
That lamb sounds delicious and brings back memories of real braais in Cape Town. All too often here in Australia, the barbeque is a gas hot plate on which people pour oil and then fry sad, very British, fatty sausages. I have been to a farm barbeque where the sausages were slapped into unbuttered slices of ersatz, white bread.
Of course there are the traditional prawns on the barbie, but they might as well be prawns in the wok or the fry pan. Long live the smell of wood smoke and a real braai.