The Caribbean · Volume 10, Pimento Smoke, the Maroon Fire and the Ital Table
Jerk pork and chicken
Portland, Jamaica
An illustration of the dish, not a photograph of it cooked.
- Time
- Hands on 2 hours · Waiting 8 hours
- Researched
- No outside sources linked
- Reviewed
- Not yet reviewed from inside the tradition
- Cooked
- Not yet cooked and reported
As tradition built it
Jerk pork and chicken
Serves 4 . About 2 hours, plus overnight marinating
Ingredients
- 8 chicken legs (or a similar weight of pork) pork or chicken
- 1 to 2 Scotch bonnet
- 2 tbsp, dried pimento (allspice) berries
- 15 sprigs thyme
- 4 scallion
- 6 cloves garlic
- 60g ginger
- as available pimento wood, for smoking
Method
- Rub or marinate the pork or chicken well ahead of cooking in a wet paste of Scotch bonnet, pimento, thyme, scallion, garlic and ginger.
- Cook low and slow over pimento wood, traditionally in a pit, today more often in a split oil drum with the grill covered by galvanised zinc to trap the smoke as steam.
Notes
No credible source anywhere in the research behind this chapter gives a single traditional numeric ratio for the marinade, a genuine and stated gap rather than a smoothed-over one; what survives consistently is the method and the balance principle, not a fixed formula.
What a modern chef changes
Kamado smoke, pimento toasted fresh
Rung 01, 04, 05
Method
- Run the Big Green Egg as a low, indirect kamado smoker with pimento wood chunks in a foil boat around the coals, a documented home-cook workaround that stops the wood combusting too fast and maximises smoke exposure; a genuine substitute when pimento wood itself is unavailable is whole allspice berries added to fruitwood.
- Toast pimento berries fresh in a dedicated spice grinder just before blending the marinade, following the toast-then-grind principle.
- Finish the meat with a Scotch bonnet dust, dehydrated and ground fine, dusted on at the table for heat without diluting the marinade's own balance.