Jerk Chicken: The Best Marinade You've Never Tried

I personally have very little experience working with Caribbean flavors, but I stumbled upon something similar to this recipe in a little cookbook at work several months ago. (Cookbook info forthcoming.) This particular gem of a recipe caught my eye as I was looking for a jerk chicken methodology that did not involve the use of the bottled 'jerk spice' they stocked at work. This particular mass-marketed spice blend is quite tame and certainly doesn't inspire the epiphany that comes with the discovery of great food.

The jerk chicken recipe I found, however, was brilliant. It involves a wet marinade with many strong flavors, and offers as a result delicious, tangy chicken with a unique and complicated flavor profile. If you have never experimented with Caribbean cooking, I implore you to try your hand at this recipe and marvel at the results. I certainly did.


Jerk Chicken

Marinade:
1 cup scotch bonnet chilies, finely chopped, with seeds
1/2 cup allspice, ground
3/4 cup garlic, minced
3/4 cup ginger root, minced
3/4 cup brown sugar, packed
1 cup yellow mustard, dried & ground
1/4 cup cinnamon, ground
1/4 cup Tabasco or other hot pepper sauce
18 scallions, white and green portions, sliced thinly
1 1/2 cup cider vinegar
3 cups olive oil
3/4 cup lime juice
generous handful kosher salt
1/8 cup black pepper, freshly ground

12 servings of fresh chicken, bone-in, skin-on (3 whole chickens quartered into breast & thigh/leg pieces, or 12 chicken breasts, or 12 thigh/leg pieces, or any combination thereof)

1. Mix all marinade ingredients together.

2. Submerge the chicken into the marinade in a large container, or in tightly sealed zip-lock bags. Refrigerate for at least one full day, two should give you even tastier results.

3. Remove chicken from marinade and gently shake any excess off--any that sticks to the chicken is meant to stay there! Prepare a grill, stove top pan, or oven as to your preference. The grill will net you the best flavor. For a charcoal grill, a two level fire is ideal, one side very hot to begin cooking, skin side down. This will result in a seared, crispy skin, and an excellent charred flavor. After skin is well seared, perhaps 5 or 6 minutes, flip chicken skin side up and cook another 5 minutes or so on the hot side of the grill. At this time, move chicken to the other side of the grill which should be at medium heat and allow to finish cooking (to approx. 165 degrees F), turning the pieces back skin side down if bottoms begin to get too dark. If a gas grill is used for cooking and does not allow for separate heating zones, than cook from start to finish at medium high, turning down near the end of cooking if chicken is getting too dark.

4. Allow chicken pieces to rest 5 or 10 minutes, then serve! This dish would be delicious with simple white rice and fried plantains. Red beans and rice or something like it would also work well.

[Notes:

1. This recipe as written is for quite a large batch of chicken. Certainly smaller amounts could be made by scaling the numbers back to a much smaller amount. The ratios for a small batch would be identical to this one.

2. As with nearly all applications using whole chicken breasts I would advocate for the use of bone-in, skin-on chicken here. The moistness and flavor imparted from the bone and the heavenly crisp skin make for great eating. If you are particularly health food oriented by all means leave off the skin, and if you are opposed to bone-in food, leave out the bone. For those paying attention this leaves you with the ever popular boneless skinless chicken breast, and yes, this dish will still be great if you go that route.

3. In a pinch you could do lots of substitutions here, Serrano or other very hot peppers for the scotch bonnets, alternate vinegars for the cider, lemon juice for the lime, etc., but I think the flavor profile as written will be hard to improve upon.

4. Though this recipe calls for chicken, certainly pork should work here just fine, a whole chicken could be marinated and roasted, or a dozen other alterations could be enacted to vary the final product. Happy experimenting!]