/ck/ - Food & Cooking

After finishing a three-week road trip in Namibia we returned to the capital of Windhoek. After weeks of eating wild game meat like springbok, oryx and kudu we were in the mood for some good old-fashioned beef. We headed to Katutura, a former apartheid-era village, known for the Soweto market. There open-air barbecues, or braiis, serve grilled meat in a unique manner. Diners tell the grill master how much they want to spend and he takes his large knife to shove that amount of sizzling meat to one side of the grill. Then they pick the meat up with their hands and dip it in a box filled with salt, pepper and spices. Everyone uses the same box for this. The smell of the cooking meat was driving us wild so we quickly dove into the communal feast. We assumed the meat was beef but it looked and tasted different. Someone pointed us in the direction of the butcher’s booths. There we saw slabs of meat with a gray, furry skin; donkey meat they said. We had just eaten the traditional Namibian barbecue called kapana, which may or may not have been donkey. It’s probably better than we didn’t know that ahead of time but damn, it tasted good.