Looking for something new or just wondering about allspice? Let’s make jerk chicken and feel Jamaica’s vibes!

We don’t know things exist until we look for them. It’s the fascinating workings of our brain that if something doesn’t pose immediate danger, it just as well doesn’t exist at all.

How wide is the window to the world?

According to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, our attention is estimately limited to about 120 bits per second at any time. That bandwidth or window is the speed limit for the traffic of information we pay conscious attention to any time.

If that bandwidth is occupied and no threat to our life grabs our subconscious attention, we zoom by anything like it never existed.

We can happily live our life we’ve grown up, eating the same food we accustomed to and do the same shopping we always did without even realize what we are doing.

Can we do more with what we have?

Only when we are forced out of our little life -like it happens when we move into another country, try out a new grocery store, learn to drive with a stick shift or just look for a new spice- we face the enormous amount of information around us, we need to process to successfully achieve our goals.

Luckily, once we got accustomed to the new situation and our brain loads off the new habits into its autonomous system, living life becomes a less strenuous exercise again.

We can happily stroll around the isles without reading the labels, translating them, comparing the prices, in case of stick shifts listening to music, putting on the last touches of our make up and arguing with the kids why they shouldn’t make unpredictable noises while traveling in the car’s back seat.

Or in case of exotic spices, look above and below our eye level on the shelves of our local grocery store and find that they were probably always there without us ever noticing them before. Wonder who uses such things.

What is the secret sauce or spice?

Jerk seasoning principally consists of allspice and Scotch bonnet peppers. Other ingredients may include cloves, cinnamon, scallions, nutmeg, thyme, garlic, brown sugar, ginger, and salt.

Jerky, originally means dried, salted meat which the dish in its modern form isn’t but it’s dry-rubbed or brined before slow cooked and more importantly smoked over pimento wood.

Traditional method involves making coal from pimento wood then placing the meat on a pimento wood frame over smoldering coal. The slow smoldering flame both burns the pimento wood frame underneath the meat and the meat itself while the meat also got smoked from the frame underneath.

It’s a pretty simple method in the open air but recreating it in our kitchen or anywhere where the pimento wood isn’t natively grown, is an unfathomable challenge. If anyone is lucky enough to have a piece of pimento wood and willing to smoke the kitchen or have a wood burning oven installed, doubt not what to cook in it.

Is jerk chicken possible at home?

For the rest of us, poor souls, we have to be content what’s given, and make the most of it. Luckily, Jerk chicken spices are all over the world so with a bit of searching, we can source them pretty easily, even though we may have never seen them in the shops before.

Many times, all it takes to find new things is to open our minds and all what we were looking for is already there hiding in plain sight or maybe on the top shelf where we never looked before.

Ingredients

(for 2 chicken)

4 teaspoons / 20g Salt
1 piece / 150g Onion
6 pieces / 300g Green onion
4 cloves / 12g Garlic
1 piece / 25g Habanaro/Jalapeno/Hot pepper of choice (optional)
1″ / 15g Ginger
1 piece / 10ml Lime juice
¼ cup / 60ml Soy sauce
1 tablespoon / 1g Thyme (or one sprig)
1 teaspoon / 0.5g Black pepper
1 teaspoon / 0.5g Allspice
½ teaspoon / 0.5g Cinnamon
½ teaspoon / 0.5g Ground nutmeg
2 whole / 4kg Chicken

How to make Jerk chicken

In a blender, combine salt, onion, green onion, garlic, hot pepper, ginger, lime juice, soy sauce, thyme, black pepper, allspice, cinnamon and nutmeg.
Rub the chicken with the spice mixture.
Let it sit a couple of hours in the fridge but even better if we let the chicken sit 24 – 48 hours in the marinade. Arrange the pieces of the chicken onto a baking tray so they don’t touch each other. Pour the remaining marinade onto the chicken.
Roast the chicken in a 390°F / 200°C oven until cooked through, about 45 – 60 minutes.