Throwback Thursday: Jerepigo & Pinotage lamb’s neck potjie

29 Aug 2024

The ages-old tradition of cooking a stew in a three-legged pot came down the centuries to us in our time, and it remains one of the most essential ways to cook food. Cooking slowly on open fire goes to the roots of civilisation.

The Weather Man is throwing up some perfect potjie days as the shoulder season edges us towards what is likely to be a sweltering summer. It’s time to get the potjie out of storage and start storing away our potjie recipes.

Saturday afternoon is potjie time for me, and experience has taught me that, for a meat potjie, you need the entire afternoon. Poultry is much faster, and a seafood potjie takes hardly any time at all, but for red meat you need four to five hours, all told. More, if the meat is oxtail – that needs six hours, including prep time.

It needs to be understood that this is not all cooking time. You need an hour up front just to get a decent bed of coals going, and then to have enough wood to keep building that up.

A jug of aromatics

Here’s how to make a meat potjie, step by step, including what I call a jug of aromatics:

Find your potjie (or choose which size if you have more than one), give it a good wash and rinse, dry it and put it at the braai spot. Put the lid on so that ash does not collect inside.

Light a fire and keep it going for the entire duration of cooking.

While the fire is building up coals, get into the kitchen and prepare all your meat and vegetables: slice meat into chunks, chop vegetables; gather herbs etcetera.

Make a jug of aromatics: choose a stock such as beef, lamb or chicken; any wine, fortified wine or liqueur, or a combination of those; any wet condiments such as soy, chutney, marmalade, jam, Worcestershire sauce, prepared mustard; herbs such as thyme/bay can be added to the jug, too, and a basic seasoning of salt and pepper.

Add fat (oil, butter, coconut oil) to the potjie, scoop some coals underneath.

Cook your onion/vegetables.

Add your meat.

Pour in the jug of aromatics.

Put the lid on and cook for hours, according to the recipe you’ve chosen. Such as this one…

I chose two smallish lamb necks for his potjie, to feed four. So I sliced each neck in half down the middle, as if from the head towards the torso. There would be a half neck per person. That may be a lot of meat, depending on the age of the animal and consequently the size of the neck. But leftovers are never a problem.

Enjoy Tony Jackman’s writing and way with food? Sign up to Tony’s weekly newsletter here. It’s free, and in your inbox every Friday afternoon. If it goes to promotions or spam at first, please drag it into your inbox.

I decided on two wines: pinotage, and jerepigo. One would bring depth, the other a heady sweetness. Jerepigo and its first cousin hanepoot have something of the old ways about them. They belong in dishes from older times, whether a pot bubbling under wagon wheels or a hot pudding baking in an old green Aga. And Pinotage, well, that’s our true blue South African original, now famous in all the world. Yes, we can add it to a potjie, and hereby we do.

Rosemary would leaven the sweetness of the jerepigo, bay would bring whatever that little something is that bay brings to a dish, and it would all be built on a classic base of onion, celery, carrot and leek.

To add further breadth of flavour, I chopped up some fresh ginger finely and threw that in as well.

Tony’s Jerepigo & Pinotage lamb’s neck potjie

(Serves 4)

Ingredients

3 Tbsp olive oil

1 large onion, chopped

2 leeks, sliced

3 carrots, peeled and sliced

3 celery stalks, diced

4 garlic cloves, chopped

3 cm piece of fresh ginger, peeled and finely chopped

2 lamb necks, sliced in half down the middle

For the jug of aromatics:

800ml lamb stock (diluted Nomu fond or liquid lamb stock)

500ml Pinotage

200ml jerepigo

3 rosemary sprigs

2 bay leaves

Smoked maldon salt to taste

Black pepper to taste

Method

Once you have hot coals, scoop some under the potjie and add oil. When hot, add the onion and cook for a few minutes. Add the leeks, carrots, celery, garlic and ginger and cook, stirring now and then, until the vegetables are softened.

Add the four neck halves, and stir to merge with the vegetables. Leave it to simmer while you go back into the kitchen to boil a kettle, grab a 2 litre jug and squeeze the fond or liquid stock into it. Add 1 litre of boiling water, stir, then add the pinotage and jerepigo. Pop in the rosemary sprigs and bay leaves, and season with salt and black pepper.

Pour the jug of aromatics into the potjie, stir, put the lid on, and cook for about 3 hours, even 4. Keep adding coals around the base of the potjie and a few on the lid. Serve with rice, pap or mashed potato. DM

Tony Jackman is Galliova Food Writer 2023, jointly with TGIFood columnist Anna Trapido. Order his book, foodSTUFF, here

Follow Tony Jackman on Instagram @tony_jackman_cooks.

This dish is photographed in a bowl by Mervyn Gers Ceramics.

Categories:

TGIFood

Tags:

DM is much better if you are signed in...

TGIFood