Jamaican beef patty

As tradition built it

Jamaican beef patty

Makes 8 . 2 hours, including chilling and baking

Ingredients

An outline, not yet a recipe: the tradition's method with its ingredients named but not weighed. Quantities are being added from sources inside the tradition, lead dishes first.

• 4 cups (about 500g) flour, enough for 8 patties hand-pie pastry
• 900g (2lb), minced beef, for the filling
• cumin
• 4 tsp paprika
• 5 tsp turmeric
• 1 1/3 cups, chopped scallion
• 1, stemmed and thinly sliced (more or less to taste) Scotch bonnet

Method

1. Fill a hand-pie pastry, a Jamaican hybrid of the Cornish pasty and the Iberian empanada, with a beef filling.
2. Season the filling with cumin, paprika and turmeric, and scallion, additions credited to Chinese and Indian indentured migrants.
3. Add Scotch bonnet for the patty's distinctive heat, a later addition.

Notes

Chinese-Jamaican bakeries remain the dominant historic producers, a direct continuation of the grocery and bakery trade those indentured labourers' descendants established across the island.

A recurring claim that scallion in the filling is a Chinese-indenture legacy is presented even by its own sources as speculative rather than documented.

What a modern chef changes

Clarified lamination, confit onion

Method

1. Laminate the pastry with clarified butter passed through a chinois rather than whole butter, for a cleaner, shorter flake and a higher smoke point through the bake.
2. Confit the beef filling's onion at a genuinely low, long heat, the same low-and-slow principle Volume 26's empanada de pino used for exactly the same reason, so the onion loses its raw acidity entirely before it meets the pastry.
3. Finish the filling with a dust of freshly toasted, freshly ground pimento from the spice grinder rather than pre-ground allspice.