Koesisters
Photo: Tasneem J · CC BY 4.0

Koesisters is a signature dish of South Africa; we have verified places to eat it in Cape Town. Cape Malay spiced dough balls, deep-fried, dipped in boiling syrup and rolled in desiccated coconut. Start with where to eat Koesisters in Cape Town.

Koesisters · Cape Town

Cape Malay spiced dough balls, deep-fried, dipped in boiling syrup and rolled in desiccated coconut. Sold on Sunday mornings in Bo-Kaap, and not the same thing as an Afrikaner koeksister.

The koesister is a Cape Malay pastry with a cake-like crumb, spiced with cinnamon, aniseed, ginger, cardamom and dried tangerine skin powder, and the technique came to the Cape with people enslaved and exiled from the Indonesian archipelago from the 1650s. It is fried, cooled, cooked briefly in syrup and finished in coconut. The Afrikaner koeksister is a different pastry entirely: a crisp plaited doughnut drowned in cold syrup, with no spice and no coconut. In Bo-Kaap the koesister is a Sunday-morning routine, bought warm by the bag and eaten with milky tea.

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