Cast Iron Jerk Chicken

Nostalgia is a tough thing to chase. And yet here I am.

The summer before I started college, my friends and I took a trip to Jamaica. A week in an island paradise to swim and listen to music and hang out. I wrote a short story that blatantly ripped off Fight Club even though I wouldn't recognize it for a while. But the thing that stuck with me the most has to be the food.

Foods that I tried for the first time and have never been able to relive the tastes since. Rice and peas, which are really beans. Fried plantains, which aren't deep-fried. Beef patties, which are empanada-like. And the crown jewel, jerk chicken.

That week I had jerk chicken at least three times from different vendors in the area. I remember one was very reminiscent of barbecue chicken, and another that was very different, unlike anything I'd had before. But they were all delicious.

Over the last 18 years, I've tried various Jamaican restaurants trying to experience those flavors again. Here's a typical result.

Since I've been on a cast-iron kick and getting more confident in the kitchen, I thought it was time to attempt my own jerk chicken.

(My junior year of college, I hosted a Jamaican dinner for friends. Jerk chicken and jerky potatoes for vegetarians were on the menu, but I just used a store bought sauce. A college-budget approximation of the dish.)

I knew my technique would be to use skin-on, bone-in chicken thighs like I did in this recipe. Get the skin perfect, flip and finish cooking the meat through in the oven.

So the question was how do I make the sauce?

I found four that looked good: Caribbean Pot, Bon Appetit, Food and Wine, and Spruce Eats.

One of the first things that I did was compare all the ingredients to understand what "jerk" really means. The common elements seemed to be allspice, thyme, scotch bonnet peppers, scallions.

I decided on Caribbean Pot, because it seemed likely to me that it was the most authentic. But then I figured it wouldn't be that much harder to make 2 marinades because they overlap ingredients. Based on looks, I picked the Spruce Eats recipe as well.

The snag I ran into is that I couldn't find scotch bonnets in Overland Park. I went to three stores and called a fourth. The fourth said he tried to order some but they were out of stock. So maybe I'll have access to them one day. The habanero is the closest so I brought those home.

So I made two batches of marinade in my food processor. In all pictures, the Caribbean Pot recipe is on the left, Spruce Eats on the right. Two chicken thighs in each bag.

Despite sharing most ingredients, they looked quite a bit different. The left one has half a cup of orange juice and half an onion. It was quite liquidy and made about twice as much. The one on the right was more of a paste and obviously much darker. Here's the phase cooking skin down.

Once I got the color I wanted on the skin, I flipped them...

and added the remaining marinade to each batch.

Then the pan went in a 425-degree oven for 15-20 minutes.

Here's the finished product. It looks really dark, but it didn't taste burnt. The marinades have brown sugar in them so they definitely caramelized and got a nice dark bark.

I even took a bonus shot of one cut open so you can see how juicy the meat is.

Both turned out very tasty. But it was easy to pick a winner in my mind. Once I saw the colors of the marinades, I though the Spruce Eats one looked like the right dark color. I kept an open mind and in the end, the colors of the final product were pretty similar. But the Spruce Eats one tasted better.

Here's the winning recipe in case Hoagie Central outlives the Spruce Eats.

First, the alterations I made. I threw in maybe a teaspoon of whole allspice berries, plus maybe a teaspoon more of ground allspice. Definitely not half a cup, because that seemed like a crazy amount. I used 2 whole habanero instead of the scotch bonnets. I used 5 whole sprigs of fresh thyme. I used 5 scallions instead of 2 bunches. I used 2 tsp salt and 1/2 tsp black pepper. And I used 2 packets of soy sauce since I don't actually pay for soy sauce.

I think the main reason this one was better is for what it didn't have in it. No orange juice, oil, vinegar or onion. So the result was a much more compact paste. In essence, it didn't get diluted with liquids or vegetables like the other one. More concentrated. Perhaps the only ingredient that I like from the other one that I could add to this one is the fresh ginger. But it's not like I could taste it or its absence from this test.

Also, the whole allspice berries did not get crushed in my food processor, so if I'm going to used those again, I feel like I should make sure they get crushed.

This recipe calls for 8 tablespoons of allspice, which is like a whole jar. I think 2 tablespoons would be plenty.


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Now the big question. Did it taste like I remembered? To be honest, even before I made it, I couldn't remember what the Jamaican ones tasted like. It's been 18 years. Biting into didn't take me back to that week, but I don't know that if was in Jamaica today that it would bring back those memories.

Or maybe if I had the scotch bonnets, it would have.

Or maybe it needs to be smoked over pimento wood.

I made a really good Jerk Chicken today. At this point, I either have to be okay with that or travel to Jamaica and test how fragile memories can be.