Garlic Chicken Potjie

One of my favourite potjie's to cook at the moment is a Garlic Chicken potjie. It's very easy to make and the end result is delicious!

Basic ingredients:

1 whole chicken
loads of unpeeled garlic cloves, 20 - 40
olive oil
mixed herbs
some sea salt (any salt will do really)
some ground black pepper
some lemon juice
some dry white wine, about 100ml & same amount of water

Method:

Chuck the garlic, olive oil and spices in your potjie then throw the whole chicken in there too. Next, make sure the chicken is coated with the oil and spices. Put the rest of the ingredients in the pot. Put some foil over the top of the pot, put the lid on and cook slowly for 3 or 4 hours by which time the chicken is falling off the bone. Serve in a bowl with some fresh crusty bread on the side.

Biltong batch #1

So the first batch of biltong turned out really well. Some lessons learned for the next batch which is now drying in the box. Some details of the first batch then:

Recipe -

1. Roughly 2kg of silver-side, cut into pieces about 2.5cm thick & about 5cm wide (doesn't really matter how long they are)
2. Biltong spice which I sourced online, but you can easily do this with some salt, pepper and ground corriander seeds (more on personal spice blends at a later date though)
3. Cider vinegar. It is worth seeking this out instead of using malt vinegar or any random brown vinegar as it really does influence the taste of the biltong

Method -

Get some plastic containers, empty & clean. Put some of the vinegar into a dish and dip each piece of meat into the vinegar, making sure you get it all over the meat, not missing a spot, then put the meat to one side. Some of what I have read and heard about this step would have people soak the meat in the vinegar. I think this will just give the meat a really strong vinegar taste, not ideal in my opinion. But this is all about personal taste too. Experiment a little, you know what you like.

Next, cover each piece of meat with spice, again, making sure all of the meat is covered, even the sides and the ends. Then put the meat into the plastic containers and put them in the fridge for about 12 hours, turning the containers over a few times if possible.

When you take you meat out, you will feel that it is already quite tender. Which is NICE! ;-)

Hang it on some clean (sterilised hooks) in your biltong box for about 3 - 4 days. The hardest part of all of this is just waiting for it to be ready.

About the box -

You can make this yourself, here is a lekker site which tells you how. I also saw a site where a guy made a box out of a bedside cabinet turned upside down, genius! Essentially, you need clean air circula

ting through the box at all times, the light in the bottom of the box heats the air, which rises through the box and exits at the top. The air is obviously replace through the vents at the bottom of the box and the cycle continues.

Additional notes -

• If you notice one of the pieces going bad, take it out of the box immediately or its going to ruin the whole batch, but I think the 12 hour stint in the fridge with the spices and vinegar will mitigate this risk.
• On some of my pieces, I noticed the end hanging lowest in the box sometimes tasted a little off. I think this was because the remaining blood in the meat drains to the bottom (obviously) and I tur ned off the light too early (my box has a fan for air circulation) which slowed down the drying.

Verdict -

This was some of the best biltong I have tasted in a long time. The 2kg of meat I started with gave me 8 fairly large pieces of biltong. Enjoy!

PS - I nearly forgot one of the most important things. Choice of music! For this batch, I decided on "Johnny Clegg & Savuka: The very best of..." Undoubtedly, one of my favourite albums. I was there...home :-D

Biltong Master

So I have been living in England since August 1999 and today I started making my own biltong. I have wanted to do this for a while now, but never really got round to it. Fortunately my sister and her other half have been kind enough to lend me their biltong machine so I can make a start while I build my own biltong box. I have done some research on the web and have found some really helpful videos on youtube and there are also some recipes to be had out there, but nothing really detailed enough for me. I had a similar experience a while ago when I started out cooking potjie, I just couldnt put my hands on enough information to make it really good and, living in England, out in Oxford, potjie masters are a little thin on the ground.

As a result of these two experiences, I have decided that I will now put my blog to good use and blog info on the various batches. Who knows, someone may even find it useful.

Batch #1 is currently in the fridge marinading and will go into the box to dry tomorrow morning. When it's done, I will share. Until then, hasta la vista, baby!

Here we go

This will be about the third blog I have had / tried to start. It is my intention to keep blogging this time.

At work and in my personal life, I seem to be accumulating a vast amount of useful information at the moment. I have found wiki's so useful to keep store information so you can refer back to it at a later date. So I installed dokuwiki on my laptop and had it up and running in about 5 minutes. Its fantastic and I highly recommend it.