Daily Maverick Food - DM Listen

Food - DM Listen

We are out to prove that online news and analysis can be independent, informative, entertaining, and pay for itself without doing silly things like making readers pay for access.

That makes us a little unusual – but only in good ways.
Daily English South Africa Food · Food
114 Episodes
1 – 20

What’s cooking today: Smoked salmon parcels

Smoked salmon is a safe and popular go-to dish for Christmas eve dinner, but these do need to be made ahead to give them enough time to set. An appealing festive starter that’s easy to make, these little salmon and spring onion parcels have style and substance. A touch of…
15 Dec 2022 8AM 2 min

Throwback Thursday: Roast duck & cherry sauce

Here’s an old restaurant menu staple that requires a duck to be cooked the way it used to be: roasted all the way to the bone. The bonus? You can roast your potatoes in the duck fat that drips down into the pan. I used Port and cherry liqueur from…
15 Dec 2022 6AM 3 min

What’s cooking today: Roast crown of Tipsy Turkey

Roasting a whole turkey presents difficulties, as anyone who has roasted one knows. But roast just the crown, with a delicious stuffing inside it, and you have a true festive winner. The crown of a turkey or chicken is the entire breast section, intact, either deboned or bone-in. The rest…
15 Dec 2022 5AM 3 min

Throwback Thursday: Rich dark chocolate cake

You know that glorious looking chocolate cake you see in a display cabinet in a restaurant and think, wow, that looks amazing; then you order a slice and it’s bland and hardly chocolaty at all? This recipe endeavours to taste like you wanted that to taste. This week we’re revisiting…
12 Dec 2022 8AM 8 min

What’s cooking today: Ginger chicken potjie roast

I wrote on its publication in January that this was an early contender for my recipe of the year, and so it has come to pass, taking the 4th place in my personal recipe ranking. It’s the most successful to date of my potjie-roasted chicken recipes. It’s stuffed, golden brown,…
12 Dec 2022 6AM 4 min

What’s cooking today: Ginger chicken potjie roast

I wrote on its publication in January that this was an early contender for my recipe of the year, and so it has come to pass, taking the 4th place in my personal recipe ranking. It’s the most successful to date of my potjie-roasted chicken recipes. It’s stuffed, golden brown,…
12 Dec 2022 6AM 4 min

Embers & Ash: The Art of the Potjie

It was The Honourable Lord Stephen Wrottesley who introduced me to the art of making a potjie, when it was a new fad in the mid-Eighties. And, a decade earlier, a farmer in north-western Namibia who’d shot a springbok that day. Now that I own one again, I find myself…
9 Dec 2022 4AM 6 min

The KZN restaurant that beat the Cape

Everyone in the SA foodie world is talking about The LivingRoom at Summerhill Guest Estate in Pinetown, KwaZulu-Natal, which beat every restaurant in the country to take top honours at the 2022 Eat Out awards last week. Wanda Hennig met chef Johannes Richter for our July 2021 story about the…
28 Nov 2022 9AM 1 min

What’s cooking today: Gingered croissant and butter pudding

The traditional British bread and butter pudding is switched up by using croissants and candied ginger in this air fryer recipe. Foil containers turn out to be a very handy item for an air fryer. Expect a rush on them, and foil loaf tins and the like becoming ubiquitous while…
15 Nov 2022 6AM 3 min

Food Porn for Dummies: Experts share their secrets

We ‘eat with our eyes’ doesn’t only mean a dish must look good, it means it must be photographed beautifully as well. The term “food porn” has been around for ages, used to describe unrealistic and unattainable food images that are nonetheless gorgeous and we cannot get enough of them;…
3 Nov 2022 8AM 21 min

Moon over Helsinki: The wild and earthy food of ‘Suomi’

Radio Suomi Pop playing softly in the black Mercedes taxi on the way to Helsinki-Vantaa airport has me reminiscing about a world of food captured in just four days in a city that stole a Karoo boy’s heart. If Helsinki reminds you a little of Prague in the magnificence of…
27 Oct 2022 7AM 16 min

What’s cooking today: Chicken drumsticks

It’s the perfect road food, contains a scrumptious morsel of meat and even has its own built-in handle for convenient roadside eating. These drumsticks are a tad sticky but if you pack wet wipes this won’t be a problem. You can slip sealed wet wipes into the cooler bag along…
26 Oct 2022 4AM 2 min

Perfect padkos – pity about the mess

The roadside picnic spots along every road are a boon for anyone driving through South Africa. But they’d be that bit more perfect were they litter-free. It feels odd to be writing about food for the open road while sitting at an international airport between flights, but that seems to…
26 Oct 2022 4AM 4 min

To crown it all, will the King eat turtle soup?

Now that Charles is King and measuring up the curtains for his new role, what will the food be like? We all know that the queen liked plain food, no garlic. Eating at the palace, said a frequent visitor, “is not much different from supper in an NHS ICU ward”…
25 Oct 2022 6AM 5 min

The rice dish at the end of life

Funeral rice, better known in South Africa as begrafnisrys, is part of a rich South African tradition. The grim procession snakes from the farmhouse across the werf towards the low white wall that surrounds the little fenced cemetery. The dominee’s right arm is heavy under the weight of the heavy…
4 Oct 2022 9AM 5 min

What’s cooking today: Begrafnisrys

The meal after a funeral would include begrafnisrys, the jewelled yellow funeral rice that still bears the name today, although in our times this dish is commonplace and not only brought out for a funeral or after-tears party. Michael Olivier wrote that begrafnisrys was traditionally served in Cape Malay homes…
4 Oct 2022 9AM 2 min

Stoep sitting after the rain

A stoep. A chair. A glass in your hand. The view of the koppies and infinity beyond. For Karoo people, this is living. In the Karoo, when the weather is fine and you’re feeling really placid, you find a stoep, sit down, and count your blessings. Luckily, the weather is…
4 Oct 2022 4AM 4 min

What’s cooking today: Potato & salami breakfast skillet

Take a break from bacon as a breakfast essential and use salami instead, in this one-pot (well, one-skillet) meal cooked on the stove top. This was one of my “necessity” meals, the kind of recipe that transpires when I have something left over, stare them down for a few minutes,…
3 Oct 2022 5AM 2 min

Black nights, white lights in the City of Golden food

Three nights in Johannesburg, in the shadow of a giant black diamond in uber-cool Rosebank, has you questioning whether the country’s food capital is anywhere near where Capetonians have long presumed it to be. It’s not necessarily at the coast. The City of Gold shines diamond-black. The gleaming omnipresence of…
16 Sep 2022 5AM 13 min
1 – 20