What’s Cooking Today: Chicken roasted in a potjie with sage butter

Here’s a variation on the Potjie-roasted chicken with rosemary and lemon zest butter we published in August 2020.

Add a sage-butter slathered chicken to a hot potjie and you have heaven on a plate coming up in a few hours. The key to this, apart from that perfect mélange of butter and sage, is that the potjie must be red-hot, with the sage butter already bubbling away in it, before the chicken goes in, followed by lots of browning.

Ingredients

1 large chicken, wing tips snipped off, cleaned and patted dry

20 or so sage leaves

100 g butter

Salt and pepper

Method

Light a fire and make sure you have plenty of coals. 

The bird needs to be super dry after rinsing in and out under cold running water. Use wads of paper towel to pat dry the inner cavity, repeatedly. Do the same with the outer skin, all over, and inside the neck end of the cavity.

Use your fingers to prise between the breast skin and membrane at the bottom end, so to speak. Push 3 sage leaves into each side, so they’re trapped between skin and membrane.

Then, salt the inside well and sprinkle a little pepper inside. Add a generous tablespoonful of butter to the cavity (this recipe is not for the butter-shy). Stuff 6 more sage leaves inside, and truss the legs together with kitchen string, tightly.

Place the potjie on a surface and put hot coals underneath it. When it’s very hot, add the butter and the remaining 8 sage leaves. Leave them to get really hot so that the chicken starts to brown the second you put it in.

Place the chicken in the potjie, breast-side down, give it a shake, then leave it for 20 minutes, uncovered, for a good golden-brown hue to take. Use two smallish wooden spoons to turn it (or similar), one in the cavity and the other for control on one side of the pot. Brown that side for another 20 minutes, still uncovered, then turn again so it’s breast-side down once more. Leaving the lid off at this point allows steam to escape and helps the browning process.

Now put the lid on the pot, keep a few coals underneath and 3 or 4 small coals on the lid, and roast for about 2 hours, adding more coals as necessary for a gentle cook. For the last 30 minutes, remove the lid once more and have a look at the breast side (which is facing down) to see if it needs to be turned again for the underside of the bird to brown more.

To avoid burning, you need to strike a balance between having plenty of butter in the pot and the heat of the coals. So turn more often if it appears to be over-browning. Buon appetito. DM168/TGIFood

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