What’s cooking today: Ginger chicken potjie roast

This week we’re revisiting the Top 5 recipes I turned out in 2022. In 4th place, and Tuesday's recipe of the day, is this ginger chicken potjie roast. The recipes published daily this week reflect my personal and subjective choice of the best recipes I have produced in 2022. On Friday, we will publish a People’s Choice Top 10 based on the number of users of the most-read and clicked recipes in the Daily Maverick TGIFood section this year. That list, as you will see, is quite different, though there is some overlapping. Let’s say these are the ones I’m proudest of.

The first time I roasted a chicken in a potjie was an experiment that worked. I had not expected it to; thought it would be a soggy failure. Far from it: it came out succulent, crisp and golden and I realised then and there that there was more one could do with a potjie than fill it with meat and vegetables, pour a bottle of wine in, put the lid on and forget about it until the mush was ready to slop on a plate.

A potjie, when red hot, is a mini oven. So you can roast a chicken in it with great success. What’s more, it comes out not only crisp and golden brown, but fall-apart tender and wildly succulent. It’s a dream.

I’ve done it with rosemary, with cumin and lime, and with sage butter. This time, it was ginger all the way: fresh, pickled pink ginger, and ground. It also has a ginger stuffing, the first time I’ve stuffed a chicken before roasting it in a potjie. Finally, I made ginger butter, plenty of it, to become the fat in which the fowl is cooked.

Ingredients

1 large whole chicken, wing tips removed

Stuffing:

1 red onion, chopped

Olive oil

3 garlic cloves, chopped

1 x 4 cm piece of fresh ginger, peeled and sliced into tiny slivers

2 Tbsp pink pickled ginger, chopped

2 slices day-old bread or equivalent breadcrumbs

1 cup of chicken stock

1 egg, beaten

Salt and black pepper

Baste:

½ cup salted butter

1 tsp ground ginger

Salt to taste

Method

Make the stuffing: Heat a little olive oil in a pan, add onion, garlic and ginger and cook gently for 5 minutes while stirring. Add the chicken stock and chopped pickled ginger, stir, then cook for 2 or 3 minutes more for the liquid to reduce a little. Add the breadcrumbs and stir. Leave to cool to room temperature. Beat the egg and stir it in.

Prepare the bird: Snip off the wing tips. Season the cavity with salt and pepper and spoon as much of the stuffing in as it will hold. Discard the remainder (it’s hard to quantify how much stuffing will fill a given bird’s cavity so there will inevitably be too much). Season the outside of the chicken with salt and black pepper.

Make the ginger butter: Toast the ground ginger briefly in a small saucepan and add the butter. When it melts, cook very gently for 5 minutes, then leave to steep off the heat.

Finally, get the potjie going: Heat a large potjie with coals underneath it and add all the ginger butter. When the butter is melted and hot, put the whole chicken in, breast side down; it should start sizzling immediately. Cook for 10 minutes uncovered, then use two wooden spoons, one at each side, to flip it over. Cover and cook for two hours with a few coals underneath at all times and a few on the lid. Turn the bird twice more during those two hours. It will be good with this hasselback potatoes recipe. DM/TGIFood

Tony Jackman is Galliova Food Writer of the Year 2021. His book, foodSTUFF, is available in the DM Shop. Buy it here.

SUBSCRIBE: There’s much more from Tony Jackman and his food writing colleagues in his weekly TGIFood newsletter, delivered to your inbox every Saturday. Subscribe here. Also visit the TGIFood platform, a repository of all of our food writing.

Follow Tony Jackman on Instagram @tony_jackman_cooks. Share your versions of his recipes with him on Instagram and he’ll see them and respond.

Mervyn Gers Ceramics supplies dinnerware for the styling of some TGIFood shoots. For more information, click here.