Cooked this at a potjie competition, first time everything – competition,fish potjie, biryani. I had a whale of a time and came third. I used swordfish – Roger
Potjie No: 3 Pot guide
Serves: 10
Cooking Time: 1 hour
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Ingredients
1 kg firm fish fillets (use any firm fish such as kingklip or snoek)
Cooking oil for frying
10 ml salt
4 large onions, thinly sliced 8 cloves garlic, crushed
1 stick cinnamon
2 whole cloves
4 green chillies (or less for a more delicate flavour)
5 cardamom pods
5 ml turmeric
5 ml cumin seeds
2 ml fennel seeds (optional)
1 small knob root ginger, chopped
3 medium tomatoes, skinned and chopped
1 kg uncooked rice
2 threads saffron dissolved in 250 ml boiling water
Method
- Heat oil in potjie.
- Season fish with a little salt and fry lightly until golden brown.
- Remove fish from oil and set aside.
- Add onion and garlic to potjie and sauté until transparent.
- Place all the spices and the ginger in a pestle and mortar and grind to form a fine masala.
- Add tomatoes and masala to sautéed onion and garlic and place fish fillets on top. Sprinkle rice and remaining salt over fish.
- Pour in saffron water.
- Cover with lid and simmer slowly for 1 hour or until the fish is cooked and most of the liquid has been absorbed.
- Add more boiling water if necessary.
- This dish should not be too dry.
We used cod for this recipe and it worked out great. 1kg of rice is WAY too much. That much rice just overwhelms all the rest of the ingredients. Cut the amount of rice to half a kilo and add at least another 500ml of boiling water to the recipe. With 1kg of rice it did take the full hour to cook so with less rice you should need about 45 minutes cook time. The flavors were incredible though.
Cooked this at a potjie competition, first time everything – competition,fish potjie, biryani.
I had a whale of a time and came third.
I used swordfish