Cape crusaders

On a normal evening, chef Lana Le Roux cooks dinner for 100 people. But next Sunday she faces a challenge that could make even the most ambitious professional think twice – supervising 20 chefs feeding 15,000 hungry party people at the Coin Street Festival on London's South Bank.

For an outdoor summertime event, there's one obvious choice for food: a barbecue. But don't expect the usual fare – chicken wings, burnt sausages and dried-out burgers. Neither will the food owe anything to the usual barbie nations, Australia and the US. This will be a strictly South African affair – not a barbecue but a braai, to use the Afrikaans.

Le Roux is head chef at Fish Hoek, one of the only two South African restaurants in the UK, the other being Dumela. Both of them, in west London, 200 metres apart, are owned by the charismatic Pete Gottgens who came up with the idea of the Big Braai (the first took place this time last year). As preparations gathered pace, I met Le Roux to pick up advice for anyone bored with tired barbecue staples.

"People don't know about South African food here," says Le Roux. "It's very varied. And we eat outdoors most of the year." Varied is an understatement. To a Brit, the range of new meats alone is breathtaking. There are ostrich steaks and sosaties (kebabs) made from springbok or impala or kudu or other wild antelopes culled from game parks. They also use lamb, pork, beef and game. And then there's a spicy tomato and onion relish with the most unappetising name of any food on earth – monkey-gland sauce (don't worry, it has nothing to do with monkeys or glands).

But grilled meat is only a small part of the feast. The full supporting cast of dishes will include national specialities such as bobotie, a meatloaf of lightly curried beef or mutton sweetened with apricot jam, topped with a golden savoury egg custard. This might be served with freshly made spicy sambals (relishes) such as banana and yoghurt (chop five bananas and mix with 250ml yoghurt) or raw chopped tomatoes mixed with onions, olive oil, coriander and seasoning.

In spite of the carnivorous tradition of the farming Afrikaaners (who have a passion for oxtail, ox tongue, pigs' trotters and tripe), some dishes will be vegetarian; a bobotie variant, for instance, made with turmeric-spiced rice. And pap and sous is a polenta porridge made from ground-up corn meal served with a spicy gravy.

Puddings are every bit a part of a braai feast, says Lana. "At the festival we will be serving milk tart, like a custard tart, and koeksisters (koek means cake) a kind of doughnut, soaked in cinnamon and ginger syrup.'' Another hugely popular dessert is the Amarula shake, ice-cream beaten into the creamy South African liqueur, their version of Bailey's. Amarula is made from a sweet-sour, tangerine-sized fruit, she says. "Elephants are particularly fond of them," says Le Roux. "They find the fruit fermenting in the grass and eat it and get drunk, swaying about and falling over.'' Not a hazard you'll encounter on the South Bank.

This is food derived from Afrikaans tradition, but Le Roux, her assistant chef Edmund Viljoen, and all modern South African cooks are also influenced by Rainbow Cuisine, the modern Cape cooking. Native African food may be the last to gain international fans (it's based on stodgy cornmeal and sorghum grain, beans and groundnuts), but South Africa has one of the world's most intriguing fusion cuisines. The French planted vines, the Dutch and Germans put sweetness into food, and the Portuguese and Italians were the good cooks. And more recently there are influences from Indian communities, mainly in Durban, and the culture of the Cape Malays, descendants of slaves brought from all kinds of places – Mozambique, Madagascar, India, Sri Lanka and Indonesia. Now they provide all the street food, samosas and salomies (flatbread wraps for curried meat and vegetables) with coconut sambal relishes, blatjang (fiery chutney) and atjars (pickled fruit and vegetables).

So how much of the braai can you make at home? Forget the springbok but you should be able to find ostrich if you look hard enough – start with farmers' markets. In the UK, ostrich meat boomed after the BSE outbreak; it is around 1 per cent fat but similar in texture to beef. The boom vanished after the RSPCA raised concerns that breeding ostriches in the UK was littered with problems – from climate to a lack of veterinary experience. Now it seems to be making a comeback – 1,500 ostrich steaks were sold each day at this year's Glas-tonbury festival, and Klein Karoo, a South African brand, is hoping to have its range in supermarkets this autumn. And just because your corner-shop doesn't sell ostrich, that's no excuse to wimp out of monkey-gland sauce. *

The Big Braai is at Bernie Spain Gardens, London SE1, from 2pm to 7pm on Sunday, tel: 020 7401 2255. Fish Hoek, 8 Elliott Road, London W4, tel: 020 8742 0766; Dumela, 42 Devonshire Road, London W4, tel: 020 8742 3149