BRAAI DAY: Five beefy recipes for the coals this weekend

Beef is versatile and is not only about steaks. We’ve trawled through years of braai recipes to find some of your Food Editor’s favourites. Here’s his beefy take on braaied meat.

Rosemary is a cert when you’re deciding how to flavour beef. But this meat goes with Asian flavours too. We also bring you two ways with beef espetada on the coals, and a juicy rump tail basted with orange, ginger, rosemary and garlic.

This recipe for a whole beef fillet cooked with lots of rosemary on the coals was first published during lockdown in 2020. It’s a TGIFood veteran.

This is the perfect recipe for those of you who have a sizeable rosemary bush in your garden. Give it a prune, and use the cuttings over the coals.

This recipe brings a tang of fresh Asian flavours to the braai. A rump steak is topped with a big brown mushroom that has been braaied in foil, and finished with an equally zesty relish.

You may know espetada from your Portuguese restaurant where they’ll be suspended dramatically from metal skewers in the modern version of presenting them. But traditionally they’re cooked on slim bay branches — like this recipe is.

Here’s another way with beef espetada . Madeira, by which I mean the fortified wine from the islands of that name in the North Atlantic, is sometimes used in marinades for the Madeiran speciality of beef espetada. Back in 2022, I gave it a Karoo twist by substituting nagmaalwyn, which is readily available at most liquor stores on the fortified wine shelves.

The striving to cook a perfect steak is easier and more assured of victory when you do it back to front. This method, called reverse searing , was shared with me years ago by my cookbook author friend Gordon Wright. The story I wrote about reverse searing was written in the middle of our time in the Karoo. DM