Skip to content
Cape Braai
DE
← All recipes

Meat

Ribbetjies

Pork ribs, first cooked tender in the oven for an hour and a half, then marinated overnight in a chutney glaze and finally taken sticky over mild coals. Without the pre-cooking they stay tough — no marinade will soften a rib on its own.

Ribbetjies is the diminutive of ribbe and in South Africa covers anything left on the bone, lamb as readily as pork. The sticky glaze of chutney, tomato sauce and soy is more recent and shares its origin with monkey gland sauce: a taste for sweet and sour on meat.

Prep
1 hr 50 min
Marinating
12 hr
On the fire
40 min
Serves
6
Two racks of pork ribs on the grid over the coals
Ossewa · CC BY-SA 4.0

How hot

Medium

You can hold your hand over the grid for 6 seconds · ≈ 175–200 °C

Every coal stage explained →

Which wood

Black Wattle

smoky, assertive

More on this wood →

When it goes on

The main round

The actual food: wors, chicken, fish, skewers.

Equipment: Grid · Oven

This line

Trekboers and Voortrekkers1652 to about 1900British period1806 to 1961

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

Method

  1. Pre-cook in the oven

    Oven to 180 °C. Put the onion and stock in a deep dish, lay the ribs in and seal tightly with foil, shiny side towards the meat. An hour and a half, until the meat loosens on the bone without falling off it.

  2. Mix the marinade

    Stir all the marinade ingredients together. Do not cook it — it should stay thin enough to soak into meat that is still hot.

  3. Marinate hot

    Lift the ribs out of the stock, drain them and, while still warm, brush generously with two-thirds of the marinade. Cover and refrigerate overnight, or at least two hours.

  4. Get the coals right

    Medium coals, six seconds on the hand test. The sugar in the marinade burns over full heat in minutes — the commonest mistake with ribs.

  5. Braai and baste

    30 to 40 minutes over the coals, turning and basting with the reserved marinade every three or four minutes. Each coat dries on and becomes the next layer of lacquer.

  6. Cut and serve

    Rest five minutes, then cut between the bones. Boil up whatever marinade is left and serve it as sauce.

Tips

  • The pre-cook is not optional. Raw ribs over coals take so long that the outside chars before the connective tissue softens.
  • Do not throw out the oven stock — strained and reduced it makes a strong base for a sauce or a soup.
  • No oven? Pre-cook the ribs in the potjie over low coals in the stock for an hour and a half. It takes as long and tastes better.

Ribs are the dish that shows whether someone understands what a fire is for. A raw rib over coals will never go tender: the connective tissue needs hours at low temperature, and an open fire does not offer that.

Hence the detour through the oven. An hour and a half covered at 180 °C softens the meat, and only then do the coals come in — for the thing only they can do: the sticky dark lacquer built from several coats of marinade.

And the marinade goes on warm, not cold. Hot meat draws it in; cold meat merely wears it.

After recipes by

Goes with this

Sauce · Monkey Gland Sauce

Monkey gland sauce

Total time
30 min
Serves
10

Snack · Braaipastei

Braai pie

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