Making Biltong in Canada Without a Local Shop Nearby
Six months after landing, the biltong from the suitcase is long gone, the nearest South African shop is a four-hour drive or doesn’t exist, and the only option left is making biltong in Canada yourself. This is where a lot of South Africans end up, whether they planned to or not.
Why it comes down to doing it yourself
South Africa-born Canadians are concentrated in a handful of provinces — Ontario, British Columbia and Alberta between them hold close to 89% of the roughly 51,590 South Africa-born residents the 2021 Census counted. Even inside those provinces, a dedicated South African shop stocking cured meat isn’t a given outside the biggest cities. Outside those clusters, home curing stops being a hobby and becomes the practical answer.
The cut names don’t translate
This is the first wall most people hit. There’s no clean map from Canadian beef cuts for biltong back to South African butcher terms — South African butchers describe cuts by names that don’t exist on a Canadian label, and a Canadian counter is organised around a different cutting system entirely. We haven’t verified a reliable cut-for-cut translation table between the two systems, so we won’t publish specific matches and risk sending you home with the wrong piece of meat. The safer move is describing to a Canadian butcher what you’re after — lean, minimal fat, suitable for slow air-drying — and letting them point you to their equivalent, rather than asking for an SA cut name they won’t recognise.
What a Canadian winter does to the box
It behaves nothing like it does back home. A South African biltong box is usually managing heat and airflow, but biltong box humidity in a Canadian winter is a different problem entirely. A Canadian winter flips it: indoor heating dries the air more aggressively than most South African homes ever do, which changes drying speed and can affect texture if a box is calibrated for SA conditions. We can’t confirm specific humidity numbers or drying-time adjustments for a Canadian winter, and getting this wrong is a food-safety question as much as a taste one. General online instructions matter less here than getting your specific setup right for your specific climate.
The food-safety part worth taking seriously
The honest answer to is homemade biltong safe to cure at home is: only if you take it seriously. Curing meat safely isn’t purely a recipe question — proper curing salt ratios, temperature control and drying conditions all matter, and getting them wrong has real consequences. We’re not a food-safety authority and won’t guide you through the specifics here. If you’re setting up a biltong box for the first time in a new climate, a proper curing guide written for your actual conditions is worth finding before your first batch, rather than relying on memory of how it worked at home.
The honest bottom line
It’s very possible, and plenty of South Africans do it well here. The cuts change. The climate control changes. And there’s nobody nearby who can talk you through it face to face the way a neighbour back home might have. Start small. Ask a lot of questions. Treat the SA method as a starting point that still needs adjusting for local conditions.
Our blog covers more of the everyday, unglamorous side of settling in — this is exactly the kind of practical question worth searching there before you improvise.