Britain and Ireland · Volume 37, South Asian and Caribbean Britain

Jerk Chicken

Name: Jerk Chicken
Total time: 9 h
Yield: Serves 4 to 6
Cuisine: The New British Table
Ingredients: 1.5 kg chicken thighs and drumsticks, bone in, skin on; 6 spring onions, roughly chopped; 2 to 3 scotch bonnet chillies, deseeded for less heat if preferred; 6 garlic cloves; 1 thumb ginger, peeled; 2 tbsp ground allspice; 2 tsp ground thyme, or a large handful fresh; 2 tbsp dark soy sauce; 2 tbsp brown sugar; 2 limes, juiced; 3 tbsp vegetable oil; a generous pinch salt

Jamaica, by way of the Maroons

Jerk chicken, pimento smoked chicken with a dark charred crust: bone in chicken pieces with a deeply charred, near black and dark mahogany skin, glistening slightly, resting on a scorched wooden board.

An illustration of the dish, not a photograph of it cooked.

Time: Hands on 1 hour · Waiting 8 hours

Researched: 4 sources cited
Reviewed: Not yet reviewed from inside the tradition
Cooked: Not yet cooked and reported

Genuine history, not folklore: pimento, scotch bonnet and an underground pit built specifically to produce no visible smoke, a survival technology later carried whole into Notting Hill Carnival's food-stall economy.

by Jamaica, by way of the Maroons

Jerk chicken's history is real documented history, not folklore repeated until it hardens into fact. Jamaican literary scholar Carolyn Cooper describes jerk as one of the enduring legacies of the fusion of African and Taíno cultures in Jamaica. After the British took the island from Spain in 1655, Maroons, Africans who had escaped enslavement, claimed freedom in Jamaica's mountainous interior and settled among the surviving Taíno, who shared their own food knowledge in turn. Chef Gariel Ferguson describes the traditional method precisely: escapees hunted wild boar, seasoned it with pimento, salt and bird peppers, wrapped it in pepper elder leaves, and cooked it in an underground pit built specifically to produce no visible smoke, because a fire's smoke would have betrayed exactly where a community hiding from recapture was located. This is the whole argument of this atlas in miniature: a technique invented under genuine existential pressure, later becoming a dish people choose to eat for pleasure rather than one that once kept them alive.

Read the history

As tradition built it

Serves 4 to 6. About 1 hour cooking, plus overnight marinating.

Ingredients

1.5 kg chicken thighs and drumsticks, bone in, skin on
6 spring onions, roughly chopped
2 to 3 scotch bonnet chillies, deseeded for less heat if preferred
6 garlic cloves
1 thumb ginger, peeled
2 tbsp ground allspice
2 tsp ground thyme, or a large handful fresh
2 tbsp dark soy sauce
2 tbsp brown sugar
2 limes, juiced
3 tbsp vegetable oil
a generous pinch salt

Method

Blend the spring onion, scotch bonnet, garlic, ginger, allspice, thyme, soy sauce, sugar, lime juice, oil and a generous pinch of salt to a thick marinade.
Rub thoroughly over the chicken, working it under the skin where possible, and marinate overnight, at least 4 hours if pressed for time.
Cook over indirect heat on a charcoal barbecue, ideally with pimento wood or chips added to the coals, 45 minutes to 1 hour, turning occasionally, until the internal temperature reaches 75°C and the skin is deeply charred in patches.
Rest 5 minutes before serving, with rice and peas or festival.

What a modern chef changes

The Maroons' own low, hidden smoke, given back its proper place.

Rung 4.

Method

Cook indirect on a Big Green Egg held at a genuine low-and-slow barbecue temperature, around 120 to 140°C, with real pimento wood on the coals, rather than a hot, fast grill, giving the chicken the deep, slow smoke character the original underground pit was built to produce.
Reserve a portion of the raw marinade separately, before it touches any chicken, and reduce it into a glaze brushed on only in the final ten minutes, adding a glossy, concentrated final layer without the food safety risk of basting with marinade the raw chicken has already sat in.
Rest under foil for a full ten minutes rather than five, since a longer, slower cook holds more residual heat and rewards a longer rest before carving.

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