Biltong: How South Africa Cures Its Meat, From Butcher to Drying Rack

By LouisN

Last updated: October 27, 2026

Walk into any butcher in South Africa and you will find it hanging behind the counter or piled in a plastic tub next to the till: dark, shrunken, spice-crusted strips of beef that cost more per kilogram than the fresh cut they came from. Biltong is one of the few foods the country agrees on. It crosses language groups, provinces and income brackets, and every family claims its own method is the correct one.

The word itself comes from Dutch, bil for rump or hindquarter and tong for strip or tongue, which tells you most of what you need to know about the original method. A whole hindquarter was salted, hung in the dry inland air and left to become shelf-stable protein for a trek that might last months. What survives today is a domestic version of the same chemistry, scaled down to a home drying box and a few kilograms of silverside.

This article is about the process rather than the nostalgia: which cut to buy, how much salt and vinegar the meat actually needs, why the Karoo produces better biltong than Durban, what a drying box has to achieve in litres per second of airflow, and the handful of failures that ruin a batch. Quantities are given by mass so that the method scales whether you are curing two kilograms or twenty.

Biltong is not jerky, and the difference is the whole point

Both are dried meat. They get there by different routes, and the route determines the flavour. Jerky is usually marinated in a sweet, salty liquid, then heated to between 60 and 70 degrees Celsius until it is leathery. Heat drives moisture out quickly, which is efficient, but it also sets the muscle fibres and cooks away the volatiles that give beef its depth. Jerky tastes of its marinade.

Biltong never gets hot. The meat is cured in vinegar and salt, spiced with toasted coriander and coarse black pepper, and then dried at ambient temperature, ideally somewhere between 18 and 24 degrees Celsius, with steady air moving across it. Because there is no heat-set, the muscle keeps its raw texture and the fat stays white rather than translucent. A properly made piece of biltong is dark red to maroon on the inside, almost black at the edges, and gives way to the tooth in strands rather than snapping.

The vinegar matters for more than tang. A five percent acetic acid solution drops the surface pH enough that many spoilage organisms cannot establish themselves during the first vulnerable day of drying, which is exactly when the meat is wettest and warmest. The salt does the rest by drawing water out through osmosis. Together they buy the two or three days the airflow needs to finish the job.

The cut: silverside, topside and the argument about fat

Silverside is the standard, and for good reason. It is a lean, well-exercised cut from the hindquarter with a consistent grain, it slices cleanly against the grain, and it has enough connective tissue to hold together as it shrinks. Topside works almost as well and is often cheaper. Rump has more fat and more flavour but dries unevenly because the fat and lean sections lose water at different rates.

Ask the butcher to trim the cut into thick steaks or long strips about two to three centimetres thick. Thicker than three centimetres and the outside will case-harden before the centre has lost enough water; thinner than two and you get biltong that is dry right through within a day, which many people prefer but which is closer to a crisp than to the real thing.

The fat question divides the country. Fat carries flavour and it is the part that tastes best when it is cold and slightly translucent, but fat also goes rancid faster than lean meat and it does not dry. In a humid climate, a heavy fat cap is a liability. In the dry interior, a thin even layer of fat is a virtue. If you are drying in a coastal town, trim the fat down and add flavour with spice instead.

The cure: ratios that work, in grams

Ignore recipes that give quantities in cups and spoons for the salt. Salt is the only ingredient in the cure that has a safety function, and it needs to be measured against the mass of the meat. A workable and widely used ratio for home biltong is 25 grams of coarse salt per kilogram of beef, which is 2.5 percent, with 10 grams of brown sugar per kilogram to round the edge and help browning. Below about 2 percent salt you are relying on the drying environment to do work it cannot reliably do.

For spice, a starting point per kilogram of meat: 15 grams of coriander seed, toasted in a dry pan until it smells of citrus and then coarsely crushed, 8 grams of black peppercorns cracked rather than ground, and 2 grams of bicarbonate of soda, an old trick that keeps the surface pH higher than the vinegar alone would and produces a softer bite. Chilli flakes, smoked paprika or a little ground cloves are all legitimate additions, but they are additions, not a base.

The liquid is brown spirit vinegar, the ordinary five percent stuff from the supermarket, not balsamic and not spirit vinegar at 10 percent. Some households add a splash of Worcestershire sauce for glutamates; that is a flavour choice, not a curing requirement, and it does add sugar.

The method, step by step, with real timings

Trim the meat of silver skin and excess fat, then cut it into strips along the grain. Lay the strips in a glass or plastic container, cover them with the vinegar and leave them for 20 to 40 minutes. Longer than an hour and the acid starts to denature the surface into something pale and cooked-looking; shorter and the surface has not been fully wetted.

Drain the vinegar and pat the strips dry with paper towel. This is the step most people skip and it is the one that matters most: spice will not adhere to wet meat, and wet meat into a drying box means a humid box. Mix the salt, sugar, bicarbonate and toasted coriander together, rub it into every surface, and stack the strips in a covered container in the fridge for 12 to 24 hours, turning them once or twice. They will release a surprising amount of liquid. Pour it off; do not return the meat to it.

• Dry the spiced strips briefly with paper towel before hanging so the surface is tacky, not wet.
• Hang on stainless hooks with at least three centimetres between pieces so air reaches every face.
• Keep the batch at 18 to 24 degrees Celsius for three to five days, checking daily.
• Aim for a weight loss of 45 to 55 percent of the starting mass; below 40 percent it is still wet in the middle.

The weight-loss target is the one objective measure available to a home maker. Weigh the batch before it goes into the box and again each day. A 2 kilogram batch that has come down to 1 kilogram has lost half its water and is done. This beats squeezing the meat or guessing by colour, both of which mislead, and it accounts for the fact that a wet summer day needs a day longer than a dry winter one.

Drying: why the Karoo wins

The Karoo’s reputation for biltong is not sentiment, it is psychrometrics. Inland towns like Beaufort West and Graaff-Reinet sit at 400 to 900 metres with summer relative humidity that often falls below 35 percent in the afternoon. Dry air holds a steep moisture gradient against wet meat, so evaporation is fast and the surface never sits damp long enough for mould to establish. Coastal humidity of 70 to 85 percent flattens that gradient and turns a three-day dry into a six-day gamble.

A home drying box compensates with airflow and a little heat. A cupboard with a 12 volt computer fan moving air across the meat, a 40 watt globe on a thermostat for gentle warmth below 30 degrees Celsius, and vents at top and bottom for a through-draught will dry a batch in three to four days in most of the country. The fan should move roughly 0.3 to 0.5 metres per second across the surface: enough that a candle flame held at the vent flickers, not enough to dry the outside into a shell.

The four ways a batch fails

Case hardening is the most common. The surface dries into a hard shell that seals moisture inside, so the meat feels firm and looks finished while the centre stays wet and sour. It happens when the air is too warm or too fast for the humidity, and the fix is to slow the first 12 hours, hold the box at 20 degrees, and increase airflow only once the surface has stopped glistening.

Mould appears as white or green fuzz, usually on the fat or on a piece that was touching another. White bloom of salt crystals is harmless and dissolves on the tongue; fuzz does not and the piece should be discarded. Green or black spots anywhere mean the batch has a contamination problem and no amount of vinegar rescues it. The third failure is rancid fat, which tastes of old paint and comes from a warm drying environment and a thick fat cap. The fourth is simply too much salt, which cannot be fixed after the fact and is the reason the ratio above is measured rather than guessed.

Storing and slicing

Biltong keeps for weeks in a paper bag in a cool cupboard, longer in the fridge, and for months in the freezer if it is vacuum sealed. It does not like plastic in a warm room: trapped moisture softens the surface and the batch goes off from the outside in. Slice it against the grain, thin for sandwiches and thick for eating on its own, and if the batch has dried harder than you wanted, a few hours in a sealed container with a slice of apple will bring some softness back.

Droewors and the rest of the family

Droewors is biltong’s sausage cousin: the same cure and roughly the same spice, but the meat is minced with fat, stuffed into a thin casing and hung. Because the casing is thin and the meat is already broken up, droewors dries in two to three days and takes on a denser, more uniform texture. The fat content is higher, usually 20 to 25 percent, and that fat is what makes good droewors taste rich rather than dry.

Snapsticks are the thin, dry version sold in packets at petrol stations, and chilli bites are biltong cut thick, cured hotter and dried harder. All three belong to the same tradition, and all three are made or ruined by the same two variables: how much water the meat loses and how slowly it loses it.

What a good biltong shop looks like

Buy from a butcher who slices to order and can tell you when the batch was hung. Colour should be uneven, dark at the edges and maroon at the centre; a uniform brick-red pile usually means dye or a wet brine. Ask for a piece from the middle of a strip rather than the end, and taste before you buy a kilogram. A shop that will not let you taste is a shop that is hiding something.

The price per kilogram is high because the meat loses half its mass. Two hundred rand of silverside becomes about one hundred rand of biltong by weight, before spice, electricity and three days of someone’s attention. Once you have made a batch at home, that price stops looking like a markup and starts looking like arithmetic.