Whole Jerk Chicken!!!

Greetings Gastronauts and welcome back!

Well,  its been a busy week for me food-wise. Ive been out there on the catering coal face digging up fantastic places to eat and a great recipe for you to try. 

I've been to Digbeth Dining Club (www.digbethdiningclub.co.uk) for some of the best street food in the midlands (I'll be doing a full review for you next week.) I opened up 'Chez Barnos' for a special meal with some great friends. (this is a very exclusive pop-up restaurant, invitation only and possibly the best place to eat in Cannock). and I've had a great evening of food and catching up at one of my favourite local restaurants with one of the funnest and most gorgeous women I know.


But first, the recipe and its a dish really close to my heart.

I can still remember the first time i tasted Jerk Chicken. It was 1998 and I had packed a bag for the weekend to travel down to London for my first visit ever to Notting Hill Carnival. I was amazed by the place. What seemed like millions of people dancing to all sorts of sound-systems on street corners and floats of thousands of colours pumping out everything from steel band music, through calypso and reggae to music that i didn't even know the name of. As if that wasn't enough everywhere there were plumes of smoke from thousands of barbeques all doing different kinds of food. Thai food stalls, Indian, Chinese and most enticing of all Caribbean stalls selling trays of curry goat, rice and peas, ackee saltfish, festival dumplings, plantain, hard fried hake and, of course, jerk chicken. I picked a stall at random and chose jerk chicken. As the guy removed a leg portion from the barbeque i saw him hack it up with possibly  the largest cleaver I've ever seen, straight through the bone, put it in a tray and hand it over.
I was hooked. the succulent fiery leg meat, the smokey skin from the barbeque, even the marrow from the hacked up bones. Since that moment it, and Caribbean food in general, has become my favorite food. My take on jerk has developed over the years to the recipe I've done for you this week. 
You will need to marinate the chicken for an absolute minimum of four hours but i like to get it jerked up and leave it overnight in a plastic container in the fridge for the flavour to properly develop.

Its certainly not difficult to make the marinade but you do need all the ingredients i have listed. After your first go at it you may want to change it up a bit and experiment with more or less chillis (mine is quite fiery.) But i gotta say there really is only one kind of chilli to use and that's scotch bonnet. When i made the marinade on Sunday i had to do a 20 mile round trip just to get them for the recipe, that's how important they are to it!
The marinade can be used for all sorts of things. Pork chops, fish, tofu, rabbit, lamb shanks, even vegetables but chicken is my favorite.


lets stop talking about it then and get on with it!

Equiptment:

Food processor.
Catering gloves (optional)
Roasting tin.
Meat rack.
Tin foil
Pestle and mortar.

Ingredients: 

1 Whole chicken ( medium ).
2 tablespoons of whole pimento (sometimes called allspice berries)  crushed in the pestle and mortar, or 1 tablespoon of ground allspice.
1 fat clove of garlic.
3 sprigs of fresh thyme, picked, or 1 teaspoon of dried thyme.
1 small bunch of spring onions.
2 medium sized brown onions, peeled and quartered.
3 fresh scotch bonnet peppers.
1 thumb sized piece of fresh ginger, peeled.
3 tablespoons of white wine vinegar.
1 teaspoon of salt.
Half of a whole nutmeg, grated, or half a teaspoon of nutmeg powder.
 1 lime (get a finger lime, as shown in the picture, if you can.)
1 bottle of "Super Malt" or "Hyper Malt". (this is my secret ingredient and i use it instead of brown sugar as it gives a lovely malty flavour but if you cant find it then use 1 heaped tablespoon of soft brown sugar.)
3 tablespoons of sunflower oil.

Marinade Method:

Roughly chop your ginger and spring onions. 

Remove the stalks from your scotch bonnets and roughly chop. (you may need to use the latex gloves for this as you don't want to be scratching your face, or elsewhere, with raw scotch bonnet on your fingers!)
 
Put your quartered onions, chopped up spring onions (including the green stems) ginger, spices, thyme, scotch bonnets, salt and white wine vinegar in the food processor.

If your food processor has a pulse button then use it a few times just to get everything going then blitz it for a couple of minutes. Stop the processor, remove the lid and scrape down any bits that aren't getting blitzed, replace the lid and blitz again until its a light green puree.

You can blitz it as long as you want as nothing is going to get spoiled by over pureeing.
 
Add the bottle of  "hyper malt" and blitz again. You will now get a slightly muddy
brown, unappetizing looking sauce. Don't worry about the look of it as this is solid jerk gold!

Zest the skin of your lime (here's a little tip- if your lime is waxed then soak it 
in a bowl of hot water for 10 minutes before you start. It will remove the wax 
and make it easier to zest and juice.)
Add the zest and then cut the lime and add the juice of half to the processor, but don't throw the halves of lime away. Add the oil and give it a last couple of minutes of blitzing.

And that's your marinade done!

Chicken Prep:

Unwrap your chicken and remove the string or elastic that trusses it up. ( it will cook much more evenly if its not all tied up together, the only reason its trussed up like that is purely for the look of the raw product.)
Remove the giblets if you're lucky enough to find a chicken with them in these days, you can freeze them for a later date as they are fantastic for making gravy. Remove the wings by cutting through the joint.

 

Working from the back end of the bird gently start to pull the skin away from the breasts. Don't be scared as it does feel a bit weird but what you're trying to do is release the skin from the meat so you can get the marinade right where it needs to be. Once you have got a decent flap of skin free insert your hand gently and release the skin as much as you can. You should be able to get all the way down to the legs.

Try as much as you can to not tear the skin as you want the marinade
 to sit between the skin and the meat.

Once you are happy that you've freed the skin sit the chicken in a bowl 
or plastic container and squeeze over the other half of the lime. Rub it into the meat of the bird all over then pour on some of the marinade. ( the marinade recipe above will make more than you need so you don't need to use it all.)

 
Push the marinade between the skin and the meat and massage it in.
 It doesn't matter if you can't get it all in, or if it leaks out as long as you can get it into contact with the meat.Get some inside the cavity of the bird as well so it can work its magic from there then grab your empty lime halves and stick in the tub. I like to put one half in the cavity for an extra limey zing when cooked.

Put your lid on the tub, pop it in the fridge and say goodnight to it!

Cooking Method:

Remove chicken from tub and put it in a wire rack over a roasting tin, breast side down.
If there's any marinade in the tub spoon it into the cavity. let it sit there for about 20 mins. to take the chill from the fridge off it a bit.

Pre-heat oven to 220 degrees c. ( gas mark 8).

Put the chicken in the bottom of the oven and roast for 20 mins. Take it out after 20 mins. and turn it over so the breast side is up. (this should keep the breast nice and juicy.)

Roast again for 20 mins. 

Take it out again and baste with any juices from the roasting tin.

Turn the oven down to 170 degrees c ( gas mark 5) and put the chicken back in.

Roast again for approximately 1 hour. Check for done-ness by piercing the thickest part of the leg and checking that the juices run clear, or use a digital probe to check the temperature is 70 degrees or above. 
When its done, take out of the oven, cover loosely with the foil and let it rest for 20 minutes.
Don't worry if the skin looks a little black in places, its not burnt, its just where the marinade has caramelized.
Once it has rested remove the foil and chop it up!

If you want to make a simple sauce to go with it then skim some of the fat from the juices and marinade in the roasting tin and add 2 large tablespoons of tomato puree, 2 teaspoons of brown sugar, a splash of vinegar and a good splash of water. pop the roasting tin on the hob and bring to the boil, mixing together constantly.
You can then strain the sauce through a sieve and serve with the chicken.
I like my jerk chicken served with a nice fresh green salad but if you want to make it more substantial then you could serve it with some white rice, some fried plantain or Jamaican rice and peas. ( I will do you a recipe for rice and peas in a future blog, or you can look online, its not difficult to do and is great with all kinds of Caribbean mains ).

Well that's it for this weeks recipe, please do try and make it, you won't be disappointed.

Happy eating!

I will be publishing the review of  The Rag in a separate blog which will be with you tomorrow evening (Thursday 13th February).

Thanks,

Mat.