Namibia: Potjiekos

CLICK HERE FOR THE RECIPE I USED

When it is cold out, I tend to gravitate toward soups and stews and Potjiekos sounded like comfort food with a kick that would warm a person up.

It has beef (or beef and lamb, if you prefer), potatoes, carrots, and onions so the basic beef stew ingredients are present. But then you add the spices and that takes it into new stew territory. You need curry powder, Kapana spice blend (I made it using this recipe.) and ground thyme.

I had an issue with the thyme that I think made the end result disappointing. The recipes calls for Kapana spice blend which already contains thyme and then an additional 1 Tbsp. of ground thyme. I figured the recipe author knew what they were doing so, against my instincts, I added all the thyme. And the stew had an overwhelming thymy aftertaste that was not pleasant. I guess you could say I had too much thyme on my hands.

Anyway, I ended up doctoring it to try to take the thyme flavor down a notch, and found Dave's Gourmet Creamy Garlic Red Pepper sauce to be the solution. Underneath all that thyme, there is a tasty stew, it just needed less thyme. The Kapana spice blend probably would have been enough on its own. There are roughly one thousand different recipes for potjiekos online so a different one might yield a different and less thyme-y stew.

Will I make it again? I don't know. I liked the curry addition to the beef stew so I might do that, in the future, but I would not use this exact recipe again.