The best classic South African unbaked milk tarts recipe (2024)

FAQs

What is the most famous dessert in South Africa? ›

No discussion of South African desserts would be complete without Malva Pudding! This moist and spongy baked pudding always includes apricot jam and is usually served warm with a cold custard sauce. This homey, morish dessert is a beloved comfort food for many South Africans.

Melktert (/ˈmɛlktɛrt/, Afrikaans for milk tart) is a South African dessert originally created by the Dutch settlers in the "Cape" (South Africa) consisting of a sweet pastry crust containing a custard filling made from milk, flour, sugar and eggs.

"This is more delicious than the sum of its parts! It's a real traditional oldie.

Allow the milk tart to cool at room temperature. If you put it in the fridge straight away, you will probably end up with a huge crack down the centre as a result of cooling too quickly. Be sure to use the best quality ingredients.

Indeed, when the lateder, die verstorbene ...the late statesman's personal chef, Xoliswa Ndoyiya, created a book of Mandela's favourite recipes, malva pudding was one of the highlights. The anti-apartheid revolutionary would insist that the children around him ate fruit for dessert.

The large proportion of milk in the filling is evidence that melktert was introduced to us by the Dutch dairy farmers who settled the Cape of Good Hope in the middle of the century. The custard filling is made from milk, sugar and eggs, thickened with flour or cornflour.

Amasi, a cultured dairy product, is cultured (sour) milk that is manufactured by inoculating pasteurised milk with a specific bacterial culture. The end product has a firm texture, no gas bubbles and no separation of whey from the coagulum. It has a pleasant sour taste with a slight bite/prickliness on the tongue.

Also known as “Railway Coffee” – Condensed Milk is a classic South Africa favourite that is often added as a sweetener and creamer to coffee.

Fruit Farming in South Africa consist of a wide variety of fruits - from oranges and apples to table grapes and dragon fruit, South Africa is a land of fantastic fruit and one of the main fruit producing countries in the world.

What do South Africans eat for breakfast? ›

It's a tea-and-coffee culture, so breakfast is often a cup of something hot (with lots of sugar added) served alongside something bready. That can be a piece of toast with jam or cheese, a rusk (a thick and tooth-breakingly hard cookie), buttered bread, or even a hot dog bun.

In many ways, the daily food of South African families can be traced to the indigenous foods that their ancestors ate. A typical meal in a Bantu-speaking, South African household is a stiff, fluffy porridge of maize meal (called pap, and very similar to American grits) with a flavorful stewed meat gravy.

Overmixing is exactly what it sounds like: the process by which a dough or batter gets mixed too much, typically yielding dense, tough, or deflated baked goods. Overmixed doughs and batters may have an unappealing look or feel, which remain just as unappealing when they're baked.

This tart filling is a custard as the thickening agent is egg yolks. If it isn't thickening up enough then one of two things is happening: The mix isn't being brought up to temperature. The recipe's instructions aren't very good because it talks about a time rather than a target temperature.

May be you are not using cold water to make the tart dough or you are not letting it rest to develop gluten. There are only two things going on. One is gluten and other is fat in shape of butter. If fat melts before gluten adds structure to tart, the end result is soggy.

The two deserts found in Southern Africa are the Namib and the Kalahari. The Namib desert is located along the Western coast of Namibia and is one of the oldest deserts in the world.

Biltong & droewors

Usually made from beef or game, such as springbok, biltong (a thinly sliced, air-dried meat) and droewors (an air-dried sausage) are traditionally eaten as snacks. The meat is cured in a mixture of vinegar, salt, sugar and spices such as coriander and pepper, then hung to dry.

The Kalahari Desert is a large semi-arid sandy savanna in Southern Africa extending for 900,000 square kilometres (350,000 sq mi), covering much of Botswana, as well as parts of Namibia and South Africa.

Koeksisters—come in two forms and are a sweet delicacy among all South Africans. Afrikaans koeksisters are twisted pastries, deep fried and strongly sweetened. Koeksisters found in the Cape Flats are sweet and spicy, shaped like large eggs, and deep fried. Malva pudding—a sweet spongy apricot pudding of Dutch origin.