Skip to content
Cape Braai
DE
← All recipes

Sweet · In Afrikaans: Karringmelkbeskuit

Buttermilk rusks

A sweet buttermilk dough, baked, broken into pieces and dried for hours at low heat until it is dry the whole way through. For dunking in coffee, and for nothing else.

Beskuit is South African rusk, and it is not a biscuit but a preservation method. Dried out it keeps for weeks or months — that was the point on an ox wagon and it still is for anyone driving a long way. It is not eaten dry but dunked: in coffee, in tea, at six in the morning, standing up.

Prep
25 min
Drying
5 hr
On the fire
40 min
Serves
40

When it goes on

Right at the end

Pudding in the last of the heat — or something that needs no fire at all.

Equipment: Oven

This line

Trekboers and Voortrekkers1652 to about 1900

The three-legged pot, sausage as a way of keeping meat, bread without an oven.

Method

  1. Heat the oven, prepare the tins

    Preheat to 180 °C. Grease or line two loaf tins.

  2. Mix the dry ingredients

    Whisk the flour, salt and bicarbonate thoroughly so the bicarbonate is evenly spread. Lumps turn into bitter patches later.

  3. Butter and sugar

    Stir the melted butter into the sugar until dissolved and glossy. Let it cool a little — hot butter cooks the eggs.

  4. Make the dough

    Whisk the eggs with the buttermilk, add with the butter mixture to the dry ingredients and knead to a smooth dough. No longer than necessary.

  5. Fill the tins and bake

    Set golf-ball-sized pieces of dough tightly next to each other in the tins. Bake for forty minutes until a skewer comes out clean. The dough rises considerably and knits into a single block.

  6. Break, do not slice

    Cool for ten to fifteen minutes, turn out and pull the balls apart by hand. Torn edges dry better than cut ones.

  7. Four to five hours of drying

    Spread the pieces on racks and dry at 100 °C fan for four to five hours with the oven door propped open. Turn them every hour and a half. They are done when a piece snapped in half shows no soft centre.

Tips

  • The oven door has to stay open. With it shut the moisture stays in and you are baking, not drying.
  • Taken out too early means mould within a week. When in doubt, give them another hour.
  • The longer they dry, the more caramel they taste of. Five hours is not an exaggeration.
  • Sealed airtight they keep a month. That is the entire point of them.

Beskuit is not a biscuit. A biscuit is baked and finished; beskuit is baked, broken, and then dried for hours until there is genuinely no moisture left.

The reason is keeping. Anyone heading inland by ox wagon in the nineteenth century could not carry bread — rusks lasted months. What survives of that is a habit: there is coffee in the morning, and a rusk belongs in the coffee.

On this site it is the slowest recipe there is. Twenty-five minutes of work, forty minutes of baking — and then five hours in which you do nothing but wait. If you have a potjie over the coals, you can make them alongside.

After recipes by

Goes with this

Snack · Braaipastei

Braai pie

Total time
40 min
Serves
6
Heat of the coals
medium
Equipment
Hinged grid