Ask ten biltong makers for their spice mix and you’ll get ten different answers — except for one ingredient. Every single one will say coriander seed. It’s the non-negotiable.
If biltong has a flavour signature, it’s that warm, citrusy, slightly nutty hit of toasted coriander. Take it out and you’ve just got salty dried beef.
A quick history lesson
Coriander ended up in biltong the same way most great food traditions happen: by accident of geography. Dutch settlers at the Cape had access to the spice routes running past the southern tip of Africa. Coriander was cheap, plentiful, and — usefully — mildly antibacterial. On meat that was going to hang in the open air for a week, that mattered.
So it started as preservation and stayed for flavour. Two centuries later, nobody’s found anything better.
Toasting changes everything
Raw coriander seed is fine. Toasted coriander seed is a different ingredient altogether.
A few minutes in a dry pan and the seeds turn golden, start to pop, and release an aroma somewhere between orange peel and roasted nuts. That’s the smell of biltong being made properly. We toast every batch just before grinding — never in advance, because the aroma starts fading the moment the seeds crack. (The full process, from cut to cure, is in how we make our biltong.)
Then it’s a coarse grind. Not powder. You want actual pieces of seed pressed into the surface of the meat, so every few bites you get a little burst of it. That texture — the crunch of a coriander husk on a slice of biltong — is half the experience.
What else goes in
Our cure is short and honest: salt, cracked black pepper, brown vinegar, and toasted coriander. Some makers add a little brown sugar to round it out. That’s the whole tradition.
What you won’t find in proper biltong: liquid smoke, soy sauce, MSG, or “flavourings”. If the ingredients list reads like a chemistry set, you’re holding jerky in a biltong costume.
Try this at home
Next time you’ve got biltong in the house, toast a few coriander seeds in a dry pan and eat one alongside a slice. You’ll suddenly be able to pick that note out of everything — like learning a word and then hearing it everywhere.
That’s the spice doing centuries of quiet work. We just try not to get in its way.