Beef Karai Potjie

These days (last 5 years) I really enjoy eating a chicken Karai. This is a Pakistani dish with very wholesome flavours. Karai is also the name given to a kind of “indian style” wok to cook over the fire. You might immediately notice that the heading and the small knowledge snippet have discrepancies. For one it is beef and not chicken. The cooking apparatus is named twice. This doesn’t bode well for a simple/wholesome dish (my cooking mantra).

There a method in my naming convention. Beef is the meat used in the dish (obviously), Karai in this case does not point to the cooking apparatus but rather the recipe and the potjie is the cooking methodology/apparatus. This is a kind of Afrikaans/Pakistani fusion dish.

For all my adoring fans, you might be wondering why I went AWOL instead of me going on about the recipe, well in a nut shell, I visited Morocco with my better quarter and so did not get the opportunity to blog, and sadly my tagine that I bought was confiscated at Morocco customs for no particular reason, but the country is flippen awesome.

I found this recipe via google for chicken and have used it on a number of occasions. When making this dish with fresh ingredients the taste is amazing. When I eat out I have to look for an alternate recipe since I much prefer my own homemade chicken karai.

This was an experiment to use the same chicken recipe with beef and same procedure but in a potjie. Let’s just say the flavour was amazing. The recipe has been scaled for a potjie.

Ingredients:

• ·         3 Tbsp butter

• ·         3 cloves garlic, crushed and diced

• ·         2 Tbsp ginger, diced

• ·         5 tomatoes, liquidised

• ·         3 chillies chopped up (mild heat)

• ·         2 tsp turmeric

• ·         2 tsp salt

• ·         1kg beef chopped in small pieces (I prefer approximately 20mm cubes)

• ·         1 handful/bunch of coriander (or any other meaningless measurement of size)

Method:

• ·         Place empty potjie onto fire, let pot heat up

• ·         Add butter, ginger and garlic until garlic changes into a brownish colour (not burnt)

• ·         Add tomatoes, chillies, turmeric and salt – stir and let water substance reduce to a Jam like texture

• ·         Add Beef, mix and cook until tender

• ·         Add coriander and serve!



Served with Aubergine salad