BENEATH THE STARS 

This is a great winter’s recipe for lazing around the fire with a group of good friends and loads of red wine. Being a potjie made in the traditional method there isn’t really a hard and fast recipe, so I would judge it by eye and wing it depending on how much you’d like for lunch the next day.

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Ingredients:

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• Oxtail – Not too big and not too small. About the diameter of an average fist in size.

• Flour

• Salt

• Pepper

• Butter

• Olive oil

• Celery

• Carrots

• Red onions

• Fresh garlic

• Tomato Puree

• Beef stock

• Butter beans (drained)

• Red wine – one bottle for the pot and several bottles to enjoy throughout the day

• Ideally service with buttery mash

 

Method:

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Prep your fire and get a decent one going using charcoal or wood to get it nice and hot, but make sure you have an open bag of briquettes on hand as you’ll need those later in the process. Once that is going pour yourself a glass of wine and get a few of those good friend to help you chop up some carrots, onions and celery and crush some fresh garlic, I find it’s always better to use fresh garlic as it isn’t as strong but still gives the dish sufficient flavour.

 

Once this is done your fire should be burned down into useable coals. Add some butter and olive oil to the potjie pot and place over the coals until hot. Add the meat and brown that in the pot. Remove the meat from the pot and put to once side for the moment. Deglaze the pot with some wine and fry the carrots, onions, celery and garlic until soft. Put the oxtail back in the pot and add the rest of the red wine together with the tomato puree and beef stock.

 

Remove the potjie pot from the coals and add a few briquettes to the coals to get them stoked. I would suggest between 2 – 3 at a time. This is where the fun starts. Once the briquettes are glowing nicely add two or three to below the potjie pot to keep it warm, but not hot. Ideally oxtail needs to cook on a low heat but for a long time, to put in numbers I would say at about 120 degrees for between seven and eight hours. So what you want to do for the next seven to eight hours is sit back and shoot the breeze with good friends or family. Make sure you change the coals for hot ones every 30 minutes to an hour. The potjie should be warm to the touch but you should be able to hold your hand there for a couple of seconds. I usually like to place three coals underneath the potjie pot next to each leg to distribute the heat evenly. I keep a small braai fire going in the corner to keep heating up the briquettes to swop out when the embers die. And now for the secret.

 

The ‘bloep’ frequency. Ideally you are wanting to make sure the liquid inside the pot is bubbling, or ‘bloeping’ once every two to three seconds. So you are looking at a ‘bloep’ frequency of two to three Hertz. This will ensure the right cooking temperature for the entire duration. About 30 minutes before it’s done drain the butter beans and add them to the pot. At around the same time prepare and boil your potatoes to make the delicious buttery mash for serving with your hot oxtail and red wine potjie. At this point you can open your last bottle of red wine, dish up the mash, put your potjie pot in the middle of the table and watch as everyone digs in and enjoys.