Melt-in-Your-Mouth Beef Potjie Recipe

Finally, the best beef potjie recipe is up on the blog! This recipe has been tried, tested and edited a number of times and I am thrilled to be able to share it with you. Probably the best indicator of its success, is that despite the vegetables, my kids LOVE this potjie. I used a size 2 potjie pot and it easily fed 2 adults and 4 kids with one portion leftover.

How long do I cook the Potjie for?

Cooking time can vary quite a bit, but I generally aim for 3 hours minimum, up to 4 or 5 hours. The longer times allow for more tender meat and tastier sauce! Sometimes the kids are hungry and it needs to be done in 3 hours and sometimes it’s a more social affair and the pot can sit there for a little longer while everyone enjoys another drink and good conversation.

What is the Best Beef to use in a Potjie?

I have used many different types of beef for this recipe and I would say the best beef for a potjie is usually beef that includes some bone and/or a little fat too! So chuck is good, t-bone and even brisket will work well. I have also used rump and in fact for the potjie I made for this post’s pictures, I used fillet – only because it was sitting in my fridge and two days over its sell-by date!! Generally, I wouldn’t recommend fillet though, its expensive and too lean for a potjie!

The Secret Ingredients to a Beef Potjie

There are many secret ingredients to a good potjie but in my experience, the top ones are celery, bacon, ground coriander and ground cumin as well as red wine and passata! Passata is supposed to be like tomato puree, however, I still find that tomato puree is more tart and acidic. So where you can, look for Passata on the label. Checkers and Woolworths sell Passata.

Top Tips to a Good Potjie

1. Brown your meat in hot oil. Browning the meat adds huge amounts of flavour and seals in the juices! This means you may have to have more coals under your potjie to start off to get the high temperatures to heat the oil really hot! You can reduce the heat once you have all the ingredients in the pot by removing several pieces of wood or coal from under the pot.
   
2. Layer your ingredients with browned meat at the bottom, then onions and celery and spices and then vegetables. Ingredients that take shorter time to cook should technically go in later but I add them all at once and try to avoid over-stirring which can break them down.
   
3. Don’t touch! Basically in the potjie world it is sacrilege to take the lid off the pot or stir too much. Keeping the lid closed allows for the steam to do its job in cooking the vegetables and keeps the heat at a good steady temperature. And then of course if you stir too often, you can cause the vegetables to start falling apart and apparently it affects the flavours too! So rather try and avoid taking the lid off too often and/or stirring too much! The exception however, is if you have too much liquid at the end, you can take the lid off and allow some of it to burn off.
   
4. Cut large chunks of vegetables. The potjie needs to cook for several hours so the vegetables tend to naturally fall apart or even disintegrate into the sauce. If you cut larger pieces of vegetables, and also avoid over-stirring, the vegetables will still resemble vegetables once the potjie is done.
   
5. Easy on the coals. When I made my first potjie, I completely burnt it to smithereens. I didn’t realise how few coals I actually needed. So to start, I have around 6 or so coals under potjie to make the oil piping hot for browning the meat. Then, I remove the coals from underneath and place them around the base of the potjie, but again, you don’t need too many coals. Maybe 6-8 coals. You will need to judge the heat an adjust coals if necessary – once your liquid is in your pot, you want a gentle simmer and not a wild and out of control boil.
   

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