Hungry in Berlin

On W 110th in New York, in Harlem, there’s a restaurant called Miss Mamie’s Spoonbread Too. Peasant Glasses and I have been a few times. More than a few times. It’s a kind of pilgrimage for us whenever we go, with soul food that makes you want to stand up and sing, except your stomach is so full you can barely move. Gravy-drenched chicken, corn bread bread stuffing, sweet potato pie, home-made lemonade.

But my favorite, the thing I keep going back for, is the jerked chicken. Dripping off the bone, encrusted with a fiery mudlike sauce that hurts a little, but is so complex and rich-flavored that the chili heat unfolds into something else entirely. Some kind of bliss. Naturally I’ve always wanted to make it for myself.

Jerk: It’s not entirely clear where the word came from, according to the Net. Maybe from the Spanish word charqui, which refers to dried meat (and apparently gave us “jerky”). But one key is a rich mixture of spices, a taste that mirrors the crossroads aspect of the Caribbean islands.

The other key is the peppers. Scotch Bonnets, a relative of the habenero, and thus spicy-like-hell hot. On the Scoville Chile Heat Chart, it’s a 9 of 10 (the jalapeno, by comparison, is a mere 4). One of the hottest peppers in the world, in short, used both to preserve meat and – I’m guessing now – mask a bit of that funkiness that might develop in the tropics. But whatever.

A few months ago, we noticed that the local Asiamarkts often carried bags of multicolored peppers that looked a bit like the pictures of Scotch Bonnets online. Red, yellow and green, and bell-like. I asked one of the women at the local market, and we looked them up together. According to the catalog she ordered from (and to the label at Vinh Loi, which I had ignored, they were cayennes. But this was clearly wrong; cayennes are long and red, these something else entirely.

Scotch bonnets, or something close, we decided. They had to be. So for several months now, we’ve been working out our own jerk sauce; and hot damn is it getting close to right.

The basic recipe is this (drawn from About.com’s Caribbean expert Peggy Trowbridge Filippone, with a few additions of my own):
Jamaican Jerk Sauce:

1/2 cup ground allspice (yes, that’s a lot, but it’s not a typo. It’s called pimento here, and is available in bigger Turkish groceries)
1/2+ cup packed brown sugar (available in most asia markts)
6 to 8 garlic cloves
4 to 6 Scotch bonnet peppers (see above – avail fresh at Vinh Loi, or frozen in many asia markts)
1 tablespoon ground thyme or 2 tablespoons thyme leaves
1 1/2 to 2 bunches green onions
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon nutmeg
Salt and pepper to taste
2 tablespoons soy sauce to moisten
A splash (roughly 1 tablespoon) balsamic vinegar
About an inch and a half of ginger root, grated
About a tablespoon of lemon juice

I put it all in a bowl and grind it together with an immersion blender. A little low tech, due to a lack of tools. A food processor would work even better.

Marinating overnight is key. I’ve used pork tenderloins and chicken, and both came out quite well. I have yet to grill the results, but that’ll be a beautiful thing. Just waiting on the sun for that one.

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.