What’s cooking today: Potjie-roasted chicken with rosemary butter and smoked salt

What is it about a potjie and a whole chicken and lots of butter? I asked myself this aloud after having a taste of just the rosemary butter after cooking this chicken. Then I wrote, in a note on my phone: Bloody hell. Insanely madly moreish. I think this is my favourite meal in the entire world.

This is the secret and the key: It’s the potjie and the chicken and the butter. A triumvirate. And sublime in its ultimate outcome. The smoked Kalahari salt adds something special too.

Roast it the same way in an ordinary oven and it will not be nearly as good. It is the potjie that makes the difference. I cannot explain why. It’s one of those mysteries of cooking that we must just accept, with gratitude. Ours is not to reason why. Like the difference a tagine makes to a Moroccan recipe. Like the difference cooking in a Romertopf clay pot makes.

And I’m so lucky to have chanced upon it two years ago when I first roasted a chicken in a potjie to see how it would turn out.

(Serves 2 greedy people or 4 stingy types)

Ingredients

1 large chicken, wing tips removed

175 g butter

5 rosemary sprigs

Smoked Kalahari salt

Black pepper

Method

Cook it fast and hot at first, then slow and low.

Prepare plenty of hot coals and keep them going, adding a log now and then, so that you always have coals if the potjie cools too much.

Clean the bird and pat it dry inside and out. Season the cavity with smoked salt and black pepper. Tuck two rosemary sprigs inside.

Place a ring of hot coals around the base perimeter of the potjie. Let the pot heat and then add all the butter. Add 3 rosemary sprigs.

When the butter is bubbling, place the prepared chicken breast-side down, and quickly move it around for the butter to coat that side well.

Let it cook for about 15 minutes, then use two wooden spoons (one inside the cavity) to turn it over. It should already be a beautiful golden brown.

Cook on the other side for the same length of time.

Put the lid on and add a few hot coals to the top.

Continue to cook for about two hours in all, but adding fewer coals so that it cooks at a more gentle pace for the rest of the cook.

You can turn it over carefully twice more for even cooking top and bottom.

At the end it was falling apart while being golden brown and beautiful. An unheralded work of art.

To accompany this I cooked whole large onions right in the hot coals. No foil, just their skins to protect them. They were divine. 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.