Boerewors is a sausage

Sausage

A sausage is a food usually made from ground meat , mixed with salt, herbs, and other spices, although vegetarian sausages are available. The word sausage is derived from Old French saussiche, from the Latin word salsus, meaning salted.Typically, a sausage is formed in a casing traditionally made...

, popular in South African cuisine. The name comes from the Afrikaans words ("farmer") and ("sausage"), and is pronounced ˈbuːrəvors, with a trilled

Alveolar trill

The alveolar trill is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents dental, alveolar, and postalveolar trills is , and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is r. It is commonly called the rolled R, rolling R, or trilled R...

 /r/.

History

Boerewors is based on an older traditional Dutch sausage called the verse worst

Braadworst

A braadworst or verse worst is a large Dutch sausage composed of pork. Along with rookworst it is the most common sausage served along most varieties of stamppot but is eaten with other dishes as well and can be found throughout the Netherlands and Flanders.The name braadworst means roast sausage...

, though it differs somewhat in its ingredients. Boerewors is made from coarsely minced

Mincing

Mincing is a food preparation technique in which food ingredients are finely divided. The effect is to create a closely bonded mixture of ingredients and a soft or pasty texture. Flavoring ingredients such as garlic, ginger, and fresh herbs may be minced to distribute flavor more evenly in a mixture...

 beef

Beef

Beef is the culinary name for meat from bovines, especially domestic cattle. Beef can be harvested from cows, bulls, heifers or steers. It is one of the principal meats used in the cuisine of the Middle East , Australia, Argentina, Brazil, Europe and the United States, and is also important in...

 (sometimes combined with minced pork

Pork

Pork is the culinary name for meat from the domestic pig , which is eaten in many countries. It is one of the most commonly consumed meats worldwide, with evidence of pig husbandry dating back to 5000 BC....

, lamb, or both) and spice

Spice

A spice is a dried seed, fruit, root, bark, or vegetative substance used in nutritionally insignificant quantities as a food additive for flavor, color, or as a preservative that kills harmful bacteria or prevents their growth. It may be used to flavour a dish or to hide other flavours...

s (usually toasted coriander seed

Coriander

Coriander is an annual herb in the family Apiaceae. Coriander is native to southern Europe and North Africa to southwestern Asia. It is a soft, hairless plant growing to tall. The leaves are variable in shape, broadly lobed at the base of the plant, and slender and feathery higher on the...

, black pepper

Black pepper

Black pepper is a flowering vine in the family Piperaceae, cultivated for its fruit, which is usually dried and used as a spice and seasoning. The fruit, known as a peppercorn when dried, is approximately in diameter, dark red when fully mature, and, like all drupes, contains a single seed...

, nutmeg

Nutmeg

The nutmeg tree is any of several species of trees in genus Myristica. The most important commercial species is Myristica fragrans, an evergreen tree indigenous to the Banda Islands in the Moluccas of Indonesia...

, cloves and allspice

Allspice

Allspice, also called Jamaica pepper, pepper, myrtle pepper, pimenta, or newspice, is a spice that is the dried unripe fruit of Pimenta dioica , a mid-canopy tree native to the Greater Antilles, southern Mexico, and Central America, now cultivated in many warm parts of the world...

). Like many other forms of sausage, boerewors contains a high proportion of fat, and is preserved

Food preservation

Food preservation is the process of treating and handling food to stop or slow down spoilage and thus allow for longer storage....

 with salt

Salt

In chemistry, salts are ionic compounds that result from the neutralization reaction of an acid and a base. They are composed of cations and anions so that the product is electrically neutral...

 and vinegar

Vinegar

Vinegar is a liquid substance consisting mainly of acetic acid and water, the acetic acid being produced through the fermentation of ethanol by acetic acid bacteria. Commercial vinegar is produced either by fast or slow fermentation processes. Slow methods generally are used with traditional...

, and packed in sausage casings

Casing (sausage)

Casing, sausage casing, or sausage skin is the material that encloses the filling of a sausage. Casings are divided into two categories, natural and artificial...

. Traditional boerewors is usually formed into a continuous spiral, as illustrated on the right. Boerewors is often served with pap

Pap (food)

Pap , a traditional porridge made from mielie-meal , is a staple food of the Bantu inhabitants of South Africa...

 (traditional South African porridge made from mielie-meal

Mielie-meal

In South Africa, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Malawi, and many other parts of sub-Saharan Africa, a relatively coarse flour made from maize ....

). Boerewors is also very common throughout Southern Africa, as well as with expatriate

Expatriate

An expatriate is a person temporarily or permanently residing in a country and culture other than that of the person's upbringing...

 communities in countries such as Australia, The Netherlands, the United Kingdom, the United States and Ireland.

Preparation

Boerewors is usually braai

Braai

The word braaivleis is Afrikaans for "grilled meat."The word braai is Afrikaans for "barbecue" or "grill" and is a social custom in South Africa, Botswana, Namibia, Lesotho, Zimbabwe and Zambia. The term originated with the Afrikaner people, but has since been adopted by South Africans of many...

ed (barbecue

Barbecue

Barbecue or barbeque , used chiefly in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, New Zealand and Australia is a method and apparatus for cooking meat, poultry and occasionally fish with the heat and hot smoke of a fire, smoking wood, or hot coals of...

d), but may be grilled in an electric griller, or fried. Alternatively it can also be grilled in an oven.

A local variant of the hotdog is the "boerie roll", or boerewors roll. This is a piece of boerewors in a hotdog

HotDog

HotDog is the name of the HTML web editing tool developed by Sausage Software in the mid-1990s. At the time of its development, there were only a small number of HTML editors available on the market and HotDog gathered significant interest from web users due to its ease of use and "What you see...

 bun, often served with a tomato and is onionish.

Variations

There are many different varieties of boerewors today, including specialties such as garlic wors, kameeldoring (camel thorn), Karoowors (sausage from the Karoo

Karoo

The Karoo is a semi-desert region of South Africa. It has two main sub-regions - the Great Karoo in the north and the Little Karoo in the south. The 'High' Karoo is one of the distinct physiographic provinces of the larger South African Platform division.-Great Karoo:The Great Karoo has an area of...

 region in South Africa), and spekwors (made with extra cubed pork fat). These varieties are normal boerewors with different spices.

A similar sausage may also be made from different animal species like lamb, kudu, and springbok, but it may not be sold as boerewors. Instead, it is named after the predominant meat species, but only if it contains at least 75% meat from that specific species. When a sausage is made from different types of game it is called "Game sausage".

Boerewors itself does not keep well unrefrigerated. A similar dried or cured

Curing (food preservation)

Curing refers to various food preservation and flavoring processes, especially of meat or fish, by the addition of a combination of salt, nitrates, nitrite or sugar. Many curing processes also involve smoking, the process of flavoring, or cooking...

 sausage called droëwors (ˈdruːəvɔrs) is prepared instead in a process similar to the preparation of biltong

Biltong

Biltong is a kind of cured meat that originated in South Africa. Many different types of meat are used to produce it, ranging from beef through game meats to fillets of ostrich from commercial farms. It is typically made from raw fillets of meat cut into strips following the grain of the muscle, or...

. Droëwors has become popular in its own right as a snack.

Guinness World Record

On 16 June 2011, the Guinness World Record for braaing

Braai

The word braaivleis is Afrikaans for "grilled meat."The word braai is Afrikaans for "barbecue" or "grill" and is a social custom in South Africa, Botswana, Namibia, Lesotho, Zimbabwe and Zambia. The term originated with the Afrikaner people, but has since been adopted by South Africans of many...

 the longest boerewors in the world was broken in South Africa. It measured 514.5 m in length and weighed approximately 420 kg. The boerewors was distributed freely to old age homes as part of Youth Day

Youth Day

Youth Day is a holiday dedicated to the youths of a country.-International Youth Day:International Youth Day is an international observance on August 12 officially recognized by the United Nations.-Angola:On 14 April Angola celebrates Youth Day...

which was celebrated on the day that it was prepared.