Skip to content
Cape Braai
DE
← All recipes

Sauce

Sheba

A slowly reduced tomato and onion sauce that belongs to pap the way butter belongs to bread. An hour on a low flame is all it needs — but it really does need that.

Sheba is the sauce that turns pap into a meal. It is made across South Africa and seasoned differently by region — turmeric and masala at the Cape, more chilli and onion further north.

Prep
15 min
On the fire
1 hr
Serves
8
Effort
easy
A plate of pap with red tomato sauce, pumpkin and spinach
thomas from Mannheim · CC BY-SA 2.0

When it goes on

Done beforehand

Made in the kitchen. On the table before you light up.

Equipment: nothing

This line

Shisa nyama20th century to today

Braai as a public affair, butchery and fire in one place, fatty cuts, pap and chakalaka as standard.

Method

  1. Caramelise the onions

    Heat the oil in a wide pot and cook the onion rings over low to medium heat for 15 to 20 minutes, stirring now and then, until deeply golden. This is the one step that decides the sauce — onions fried fast stay sharp instead of turning sweet.

  2. Open the spices

    Add garlic, paprika, turmeric and masala and fry for a minute until fragrant.

  3. Tomatoes in

    Stir in tomatoes, tomato paste, sugar and water, then season. Bring to the boil once.

  4. An hour on low

    Simmer covered on the lowest heat for an hour, stirring two or three times. By the end the sauce should be thick enough for a spoon to leave a trail.

  5. Taste it

    Taste at the end. If it seems sour it wants sugar; if it tastes flat it wants salt. Serve warm or at room temperature with pap.

Tips

  • Sheba is better on the second day. Cooking for a crowd? Make it the day before — then it is not occupying a burner while the fire runs.
  • It can be made in a potjie beside the fire. It takes longer and picks up smoke.
  • A spoonful of sheba inside a braaibroodjie or a roosterkoek is the simplest use for leftovers.

Pap without sauce is a staple; pap with sheba is a meal. The sauce is onions and tomatoes and is still not arbitrary, because everything depends on how long the onions were allowed.

Fifteen to twenty minutes on low heat until they are deeply golden: that is the difference between a sauce that tastes sweet and round and one that tastes of raw onion and tinned tomato. There is no shortcut to it.

The rest is taste and varies by region. Turmeric and masala make it the Cape Town version; leave them out and you get the one you would be served from Johannesburg to Durban.

After recipes by

Goes with this