I recently made a new online friend. No, not Friend, just friend. I now live in a small town in Michigan, where there is no Fine Dining. Hell, there’s barely Dining – this is a place where people merely eat. Luckily, I am less than an hour away from Grand Rapids, second-largest city in Michigan, and home to, among other things, a damn good brewery and….<drumroll>…RESTAURANTS.
Okay, not terribly EXCITING restaurants, but places where people will bring you food on which you will not regret spending $15-20. The problem is that if I’m going to drive nearly an hour for dinner…I’m going to need company as part of the deal. So I rustled up someone to have dinner with me. And as part of the dinner conversation, I mentioned that I have, in the past, written a blog (as I sometimes do when talking to people whose only knowledge of me is my online persona). The response was an excited, “is it a food blog???”
No. As a matter of fact, it most definitely is not.
Oh, sure. If you read my posts, you can tell I am mildly obsessed with sustenance. But as a general rule, this blog has no theme. Thus my very small readership. I learned back in college when I figured out every e-mail account came with a certain amount of bandwidth for building a personal webpage that, if you want to attract readers, you need…a Focus.
I, however, despite my best efforts, have never been very good at staying On-Topic.
But tonight…TONIGHT, I will be a Food Blog. Because dammit, there is something the world (i.e., the five of you) needs to know. And that thing is:
Jerk Chicken.
Every time I decide it’s time to make jerk chicken, I nearly talk myself out of it. I try my hardest to convince myself that it is not worth the time and effort involved. Not worth juggling chicken parts on my tiny grill. Not worth the day of marination. Not worth choking myself to death trying to chop extremely hot chiles.
And every time I am incontrovertibly, indubitably, undeniably…WRONG.
Here’s the thing…I had heard about this “jerk” stuff when I still lived in Indiana. The Food Network was my primary source for information on dishes I had never tried. When something struck my fancy, I would look up a recipe and try to make it. But the problem was, I never knew if the way I was doing it was Right. I had made “jerk pork” once upon a time. Perused several recipes, figured out what they all had in common…picked one that seemed a strong candidate for the all-important title of Authentic…and tried it.
The ingredients went something like this:
1 tablespoon cracked black peppercorns
3/4 teaspoon grated nutmeg
1 1/2 teaspoons ground allspice
1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon ground cloves
2 tablespoons salt
1/4 cup muscovado or dark brown sugar
3 to 9 Scotch bonnet or habanero peppers, seeded and chopped
4 teaspoons minced garlic
1 tablespoon minced ginger
2 bunches scallions, finely chopped (green and white parts)
1/2 cup oil
Zest and juice of 4 limes
1/4 cup white vinegar
1/2 cup dark rum
(This particular recipe is lifted from the L.A. Times – there are many variations, but this one strikes a reasonable balance between too-simple and too-damned-complicated-to-ever-have-been-developed by-island-people. The directions are pretty much “Combine all ingredients in food processor. Careful, the chiles are burn-y. Marinate for ~24 hrs.”)
The result?
A resounding, “Meh.”
Here’s the thing about the recipes…here’s what they don’t tell you: jerk…is BARBECUE. And I don’t mean throwing hunks of meat on a grill and daubing it with sweet tomatoey sauce, I mean actual, honest-to-God BBQ. JERK IS MEANT TO BE SMOKED. Now, not necessarily 6-hours-low-and-slow BBQ, but this is meat that is really meant to be prepared over coals. Preferably coals resulting from the burning of Jamaican pimento wood, aka the allspice bush. Recipes will tell you you can either grill it “or just bake it.”
No. No, you most definitely can NOT “just bake it.” It will be “meh.” Is that what you want???
You grill it. Over charcoal. Indirect heat. For a long time – I do, at minimum, 20 minutes per side indirect, then direct heat for crisping it up. This works well for drumsticks, but thighs take longer. Don’t even talk to me about breasts – this is a strictly dark meat dish as far as I’m concerned.
Now, here’s the thing. You need smoke while you do this. Right now, I’m using oak chips and allspice berries (the closest you can come in most of North America to actual pimento wood is to just use the berries and…other wood). I’ve also been known to use hickory for its spiciness, but that’s as heavy as I’ll go. Mesquite is just too overwhelming. But all of that time on indirect heat is sloooowly cooking your chicken while that spicy coating on the skin is absorbing all of that delicious, spicy smoke.
Baste with some reserved marinade and crisp up over the hot part of the grill. It turns out looking something like this:
It ain’t necessarily pretty, but it is DELICIOUS. Smokey, and juicy, and damn-near-pullable in tenderness.
Serve it with a fairly basic slaw, some rice and peas (aw, crap…that’s another post), and a basic lager. We’re going for thirst-quenching, heat-cooling beverage, not a pairing here. I happen to like a Dark ‘n Stormy for dessert.
Now…if you don’t like it this way…you just don’t like it. End public service announcement.
