Cevapi – Easy Balkan Beef Sausages

Ready for a Balkan BBQ feast? It’s time to make your own super easy beef sausages. These Cevapi are stuffed full of garlic, parsley and paprika for a huge flavour kick. Pair with shopska salad for the ultimate Mediterranean lunch.

Why We Love This

You only need simple ingredients that are easy to mix together so you’ll have tasty homemade sausages in no time.

We love that Cevapi can be made as a big batch – you can double or even triple the recipe and freeze them to cook when you need. This is perfect if you’re entertaining for a large crowd.

What is Cevapi? 

Cevapi (pronounced Che-Vah-Pee) are small finger-sized Serbian / Balkan sausages that are usually made from ground beef (and sometimes ground pork or ground lamb… or a mix of all three!) before being grilled over charcoal for the ultimate melding of flavours. They often have spices such as paprika, salt and black pepper added and are similar to Kofta Kebabs found in other parts of Europe.

You’ll most likely find these simple Balkan sausages in Bosnia, Macedonia and Serbia. We love that they’re so easy to replicate at home.

Where We Learnt This Recipe:

It was a massively hot day in Ohrid, Macedonia. We’d just watched a traditional Macedonian wedding parade in the street before heading into town for lunch. The huge red umbrellas caught our eye (hello street food!), with men standing around charcoal grills and the smell of spices and meats drifting along the road.

Lunch was served in less than 10 minutes – a huge bowl of shopska salad was plonked down first before two huge plates of cevapi were cast alongside it. The grilled meat plate was a simple pile of the little sausages, with some freshly sliced tomato, cucumber and raw chopped onions. To add an extra kick, it also came with salt and chilli flakes to up the ante.

What You’ll Need

The meat is the star of the dish in the recipe, then we vamp it up with a few seasonings and spices and you’re good to go.

The Meat: We used 100% minced / ground beef. It’s common to have combinations of beef, pork and lamb though, so feel free to experiment with the ratios and mixture.

Baking Soda: You might be tempted to skip on this simple ingredient, wondering why it’s even necessary, but you’d be surprised how important it is! Baking soda actually helps to tenderise the meat and give you good springy texture.

For Cooking: It’s best to cook your cevapi over a charcoal grill, however, we understand not everyone has one available, so a large frying pan on the stove is also fine. If you have no cooktop, you can cook Cevapi in the oven. Set to 180C / 360F and place the sausages on a lined baking tray. Turn them every 10-15 minutes until browned, and cut one in half to check if they’re cooked through. If they get a little dry, baste them with a touch of olive oil. They should take around 30-45 minutes.

To serve: Grab some fresh bread – lapinja is the most common, and spread with Ajvar, a popular Balkan hot red pepper spread. Then if you like you can also load it with raw chopped onion and sliced cucumber and tomato. To make it a little creamy, you can add sour cream.

Wandercook’s Tips

• Take your time ‘massaging’ the meat together with the spices and baking soda mix to both tenderise the meat and make sure the flavour mixes through entirely.
• Make sure your heat isn’t too high, otherwise it will burn the outside and the middle will be raw.

FAQs

Variations & Substitutes

• Mix up the protein! If you don’t want pure beef sausages, try 50% beef and 50% pork, or 50% beef, 25% pork and 25% lamb.
• Can’t find lepinja bread? Serve it with focaccia or pita bread instead.
• Make meatballs! Instead of sausages, you can make them into meatballs and pop them in a pasta such as our Creamy Italian Sausage Pasta.
• For extra texture, add a chopped onion to the mix.

Got more mince meat to use up? Cook up these next:

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