Russ Waterhouse
Ok, not strictly jerk chicken - but made up from the memory of some chicken I had at Glastonbury festival back in '94 or so.
Here we go....
Ingredients:
- 5 red chillies, chopped, seeds left in (or something like that)
- Medium brown onion, chopped
- About an inch of grated ginger, or a teaspoon of the stuff in squeezy tubes
- Quite a bit of McCormicks Spicy BBQ mix (on the spice racks at the supermarket - either that or any kind of hot chilli/pepper mix)
- A good splash of white wine vinegar
- 1 jar passata
- 1 splash of ketchup
- A couple of tablespoons Tomato paste
- 1 chicken stock cube
- A few splashes of tabasco
- Mixture of about 12 chicken pieces, or 2 small chickens chopped into pieces, skin on
- A couple of tablespoons of olive oil
- salt and pepper
- A little pinch of sugar
Method:
To make the marinade, gently fry the onion, chillies and ginger for a few minutes until soft. Whack the heat up and add the white wine vinegar, with the stock cube. Give it a good stir and let the vinegar reduce until the mixture is a bit sticky' and there's not much moisture left. Add the passata, tabasco, ketchup and tomato paste and give it all a good stir. At this stage, you can leave it as it is (no need to cool really, you probably haven't heated it through anyway), or you can give it a blitz with a hand blender (if you've got one). Add the sugar, and season with salt and pepper.
Put the chicken pieces in a plastic container or a pan with a lid, and sprinkle on I guess about a third of a large jar of the spice mix. Give the chicken a good massage with the spices, then cover the lot with the marinade and leave in the fridge as long as you can (the recipe works even if it's only in there a half hour or so, but all day or overnight is perfect).
To cook, there are two methods - the politically correct, and the more dangerous potentially salmonella-ish version. The 'PC' version is to heat the oven to 200 degrees and cook the pieces for twenty minutes before putting on the barbecue - and the dangerous version is to just go straight to barbecue. Either way, you need to baste regularly with the marinade until it's all gone (I use a pastry brush but then again I'm a bit of a ponce).'Straight to barbecue' probably takes about 45 minutes, dependant on the size of your chicken pieces, and you're looking for an almost burnt finish. I serve with potato salad, couscous and a tomato salad.