ALMOST MEAT FREE: If you see the word "braaiwors" on a pack, at an apparently good price, don't assume you're getting a bargain " it's called braaiwors instead of boerewors because it contains up to 40 percent soya. ALMOST MEAT FREE: If you see the word "braaiwors" on a pack, at an apparently good price, don't assume you're getting a bargain " it's called braaiwors instead of boerewors because it contains up to 40 percent soya.
If you were among the millions of South Africans who celebrated Heritage Day this week with a braai, what did you have sizzling above the coals?
Was it boerewors or braaiwors?
The words aren’t chosen on a butcher’s whim – they are guided by regulations.
The Regulations Governing the Composition and Labelling of Raw Boerewors, Raw Species Sausage and Raw Mixed-Species Sausage, to be exact, and they are very specific about what boerewors should and shouldn’t have in it.
Alas, the awful revelations of the University of Stellenbosch study not too long ago are still fresh in consumers’ minds.
Almost 70 percent of a sample of 139 processed meat products – mince, burgers, sausages, including boerewors, deli meats and dried meats – bought from butcheries across the land, had undeclared species in them, including most shockingly, donkey, in one case.
This is what boerewors should be made up of, legally: a meat content – beef with lamb, pork or a mixture of the two – of no less than 90 percent, and a fat content of no more than 30 percent.
It may contain no offal, except in the casing, and no mechanically recovered meat, which is pulped muscular tissue, collagen, marrow and fat. Not something too many people would consider appealing.
The only permitted additives are cereal products or starch, vinegar, spices, herbs, salt “or other harmless flavourants”, permitted food additives and water.
If you see the word “braaiwors” on a pack, at an apparently good price, don’t assume you’re getting a bargain – it’s called braaiwors instead of boerewors because it contains up to 40 percent soya.
The industry calls this “extension”, and what it means is the product is a lot less meaty, hence the lower price.
About what about plain old “wors”? On its website, Checkers describes this product as being “slightly extended with cereals and wheat extract”.
So if you want meaty boerewors, made the traditional way, avoid buying any other “wors” versions.
In order to make the inferior “braaiwors” more appealing to customers, butchers add flavours such as chilli, chakalaka and sosastie.
As for other sausages, all meat species in them has to be identified, and the percentage of each species declared on the label, so consumers know exactly what they’re buying.
The Stellenbosch University study, which did DNA testing on their own meat product samples, and well as a smaller test sample, commissioned by Consumer Watch, revealed that in most cases, the undeclared meat species arose from a lack of diligence rather than a deliberate intent to mislead.
In short, the butcheries weren’t cleaning their giant mincers between batches of sausages, hence traces of beef ended up in the mutton sausages, for example.
All the retail butcheries found guilty of this by the DNA test results vowed to change their procedures as a result, but if you’re particular about your meat, and you’d prefer your chicken sausages to have no traces of other meat species in them, ask the butchery manager about their mincer cleaning procedures.
It’s good to make an informed choice.