Back to Basics

Justin Bonello fuels South African passions for food cooked on the open flame

There’s a very tall glass of water in front of Justin Bonello when our interview commences. This is my first clue that the braai master sitting in the interview has had a bit too big of a reunion with some of his Joburg mates the night before.

With that trademark contagious Bonello laugh, he launches into a tirade about not finding anything other than McDonald’s to eat when he arrived back at his hotel room the night before. If it’s a choice between hangover, and starvation or McDonald’s, Bonello would choose the former every time. His fervent belief in reconnecting with food – with where it comes from and who is farming and producing it – is at the heart of his food philosophy and forms the foundation of both the current TV series and his newly released book Ultimate Braai Master are based.

In the face of what Justin calls “the death of the butcher, the baker and the candlestick maker”, he’s bringing food back to the basics and serving up “the braai road trip of a lifetime”. For viewers, he’s offering local reality TV at its best – a cooking show with a healthy dose of pressure from various culinary challenges that has the contestants travelling all over South Africa and cooking in some of the most extraordinary settings. And for readers, he’s offering that shared knowledge seldom passed from generation to generation anymore, via recipes that will inspire and (hopefully) forever outlaw the boring lamb chops and wors braai.

If the TV series is the primer and the book a tome of inspiration and recipes, readers had better brace themselves for some pretty unique combinations. There are recipes like a beautiful fillet stuffed pork belly (one of Justin’s favourites) and then there are the slightly more daring concoctions like beef intestine sosaties and chicken necks (aka poor man’s prawns). Whether we’re talking chicken, beef or seafood, however, there’s one ingredient all the recipes have in common and that is, according to Justin, ‘umami’ – a Japanese term referring to the fifth taste sensation after sweet, sour, salty and bitter.

“A braai imparts a flavour that you can’t get from anything else. When I think about the fire, I think it’s hard-wired into all of us; it’s almost part of our genetic make-up. There is nothing more mesmerising for us as a group of friends than to settle down around a fire, watch the ‘African TV’ and just settle into it.”

One of the biggest surprises for Justin while filming and producing Ultimate Braai Master was the fact that so many contestants hadn’t been to half the places that formed part of the show’s epic 8 000km road trip.

“I’ve done lots of travelling and cooking and eating, and when I started out doing this, I really thought that what I do on the weekends is what every South African is doing,” he muses.

So many of Justin’s childhood memories are connected with food – from diving for his own perlemoen and being out on the Breede River on Sunday afternoons, to the family splitting a rabbit and eating it with avocado and bread – and to a large extent Ultimate Braai Master is encouraging adventures far beyond discovering a new ingredient or technique.

It’s about getting outside, reconnecting with nature, cooking under the stars and spending quality time with friends and family. It’s about going back to the basics from which we’ve all strayed so far.

Justin Bonello's Ultimate Braai Master is published by Penguin Books. Visit www.penguinbooks.co.za for more information.

*Article first published on www.countrylife.co.za.