Namibian BBQ The Hairy Bikers' Cookbook

'For years,

'Dave and I have been waving goodbye to Cumbria and Newcastle,

'heading off on a quest for great food.

'And this was one place we'd always wanted to go.

'It's the scale of Namibia that first strikes you.

'Three times the size of Britain but only a thirtieth of the population.

'But to get a real sense of the place, you need something a bit special.'

SPEECH INAUDIBLE

'We love good food.

'And one thing we always like to get our hands on is game.

'It might seem strange to the rest of us but these aren't endangered species.

'This is just what people eat.'

Yes!

We're flying! Woo!

'The sand dunes of the Namib Desert are some of the biggest and most beautiful in the world

'and to see them from the air was incredible.

'Nestling among them was our first port of call.

'A strange seaside town of Swakopmund.

'A hundred years ago, Namibia was a German colony.

'We didn't know quite what to expect on our first ride through Africa but we didn't expect this.

'If it wasn't for the palm trees, you could be in Bavaria.

'Peter's Antiques is a bit of an institution in Swakopmund.

'It's full of relics of Namibia's German colonial past.

'As well as some African tribal pieces.

'And Peter himself is the author of a Namibian cookbook.'

OK, now look here.

And here my favourite is the puffotter.

This is quite a difficult thing

first to catch a puffotter in the field.

Make quite sure that you knock the head off.

-Yes.

-And then you actually fry it in a pan.

And it tastes like a chicken breast.

And on your travels through the country, if you find a puffotter,

take my cookbook along and have a Namibian delicacy.

Well, if we come across a puffotter, I'm sure it will come in handy.

I think I'll be going the other way.

I hate snakes, I hate them.

-Eating it wouldn't be the first thing to come to mind, would it?

-No.

THEY LAUGH

Definitely not. Wow!

'We decided to give puffotter a miss for the time being

'and load up with some real game meat at Jan the butcher's.'

-What's this one, Jan?

-This one is oryx.

-This is kudu. The bigger one is kudu.

-The darker one is kudu.

And the lighter one is oryx.

-So does the kudu, Jan, does that come from your farm?

-Yes, it's from my farm near Kalkfeld.

That leg over there,

the first one and the meat over here, it's from that kudu.

It's proper free-range meat.

Fat free, organic as you like. You've got the fat where you want it.

I think that in some ways it's nicer that venison.

And that flavour's maintained in that fat as well - I like fatty meat

because it...mmm! It's moist and it's tasty. It's lovely.

Whoa!

'A barbie always tastes better if you can find a bit of beach.

'There's a great tradition in Southern Africa of combining meat with fruit,

'sometimes known as Cape Malay cuisine.

'It's one of the things we wanted to have a go at.'

-This is a proper place for a barbeque, isn't it?

-Yeah.

Maybe a tad extreme.

THEY LAUGH

-When have we ever been shy?

-No.

As me mother used to say "Shy bairns get nowt."

We're doing a proper African game barbeque.

All the food we're cooking is readily available in Africa.

It's not freaky - it simply is here

and we've found it to be rather good.

We're gonna kick off, we're doing a crocodile satay.

Crocodile - it's a lovely fillet. It's not a scary meat.

It's like somewhere between a good firm fish, like sea bass or monkfish, and chicken.

and crocodile works really well as a satay.

I mean you could use prawns, chicken, pork or beef

but the crocodile's perfect. It's somewhere in between

and we'll show you how to prepare it.

First off, get your crocodile fillet

strip it up and then cut it into chunks.

Do you know, I met a bloke once in Costa Rica

and he was wrestling a crocodile.

-No!

-He could wrestle a crocodile - I saw it.

He said that the secret in wrestling crocodiles is you have to let them have the first snap.

Because all the power's in that.

And they've got nothing there.

So what to do is, you could jump in the river and it'd go - mmph!

and while it was like that, he grabbed the crocodile's snout,

-and bind it shut.

-What with?

-Like a leather thong.

-Steady!

-Like a shoelace, not...

-Ah!

He was a hard man.

Well, I'm doing a satay sauce.

You know what satay is. Everyone's eaten it before.

You have peanut butter and we'll put in some cashew nuts.

And then Scotch bonnet chillies and we're chopping those as well,

and some soy and a little bit of lemon juice

and some pineapple juice maybe.

and we're gonna put it in this.

Which is called a potje.

It's a three-legged... You get them bigger than this, I do have to say.

Dave calls them a missionary pot.

THEY LAUGH

They'd be a midget missionary. Snow White and the seven missionaries.

We saw that once on video.

THEY LAUGH

I'm now ready to marinate my kebabs.

I've got some lemon juice, little bit of soy sauce, some chopped garlic

some salt, some fresh ground black pepper

again just to give it some more bite a little bit of Tabasco.

I'll finish off with some olive oil. Quite liberal so it's on my stick.

Just to tenderise the croc a bit.

And that's the marinade or "marin-ad" finished.

We'll just leave that for a bit while Si's satay sauce cooks.

Now, what's great about this and for a barbeque is you just stick it all in at once - it's great.

But you have to heat it and it has to heat through.

And you need to mix it on the heat, so on the barbeque

get it mixing and then it becomes a lovely, lovely texture

and a real nice sauce.

BARBEQUE CREAKS

Ooh, sounds like the Gates of Mordor, that, didn't it?

THEY LAUGH

-Oh, look at them.

-Oh, hey.

-It's never like this at the Connaught.

THEY LAUGH

No good grind's complete without a burger.

Ours is different - because it's Africa, we're making zebra burgers.

Zebra's quite a lean meat - a bit like venison

and for burgers, you need to get some fat into it

so whilst I'm mincing my zebra, I'm mincing up some nice fatty smoked bacon with it.

It might seem odd using zebra in a burger but zebra is a freely available game meat in Africa.

It's good stuff and personally, I like to know what goes in my burger.

What I'm doing is I'm stripping thyme here.

So what we have here in chopped fine loveliness,

we've got some garlic, we've got some chilli,

em, of sorts. Chilli's really weird here. Anyway, we've got onion and thyme.

And you chop it really finely

so when Dave's finished, when Dave's finished with the zebra,

we stick it all in one pot, give it a big mush.

Add loads of salt, loads of pepper. Little bit of Tabasco.

And that's when the kids get involved

Get it all in a bowl, get the hands in it.

Get their hands washed and get them to squish it all up

so the onion and the chilli and the thyme all go together with the mincemeat.

'To prevent a total meat overload, you need something for the vegetarians at the barbie as well.'

Gem squash with mozzarella, garlic, olive oil,

and the much maligned celery leaves.

It's really easy. You put all the ingredients that I've just mentioned, into the gem squash,

you wrap it in tin foil and you stick it on the barbeque.

You wait, it all melts. It's a cornucopia of loveliness and then you eat it.

It takes about...

BANGING

Ten minutes. Oh, dear. What..? What you doing, man?

Oryx!

Oryx is like a big antelope - woo!

HE LAUGHS

Again, it's the fruit and meat vibe.

I've got my oryx fillets which I've cut from a sirloin.

Beat them flat cos I want them tendered.

If you're eating meat, you don't want exercise, it's just got to happen.

Into my pestle and mortar, I've got blue cheese and cranberry sauce.

Season your fillet.

Crushed pepper.

Bit of sea salt, not too much remember cos blue cheese is a salty beast.

Then spoon in - that's lovely, actually -

a dollop of the blue cheese and cranberries.

This is a taste sensation.

It would work brilliantly with venison.

Spread it out. Look at that. Not too much.

Don't want to kill the mother.

And just make a roly-poly

Of course the logic is when we cook this

the outside's gonna be black and the inside's gonna be quite rare.

But the cheese and cranberries are gonna bubble up inside and go through the whole thing.

Look at that. Well, must get banging.

'Meanwhile, our crocodile satay was ready for a nibble.'

-It's gorgeous. We've really...

-HE LAUGHS

-Zebra burgers.

-They look lovely.

Great!

The beauty of it is you get the nice stripes across.

Here you are, Si, my oryx rolls.

Thanks, mate. Look at these.

Superb!

Superb!

-Fantastic! Look at that.

-Oh, hey, man.

-Out of Africa.

These look perfect, absolutely perfect. That looks beautiful.

It does, it looks brilliant.

-Think we can eat this, then?

-I think so.

I think we might be able to.

Longleat on a platter.

THEY LAUGH

Oh, look at that meat.

-There you are.

-Thanks, mate. This is the oryx, Dave, yeah?

-Yeah.

-Excellent.

Oh. Tender. Tenderer than Elvis Presley when he's getting all romantic.

-Hoo-oo!

-Oryx.

-It didn't die in vain.

-Oh, hell, no.

-No.

Come on, Kingy. Surf's up.

THEY LAUGH

What's down here?

Oh, hey, man.

'After a feast like that, we thought we'd better try a bit of exercise.'

BOTH: Whoa!

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