The Precious Jerk

It should come as no surprise that we failed to meet our critical project completion deadline. This came as an predictable disappointment to most of the Company’s expatriate staff, who generally believe that our skills and efforts might be better utilized on a highway that might actually get completed before the pavement wore out.

One of these days…..

And then we will have a celebration of some sort or another. Exhausted by the project, it will probably be no more than another subdued Friday night out at one of the local restaurants. The location of this fete will be the hard choice to make. Maybe not so hard for any usual night out, but where would we choose to eat our last meal on island?

Probably at a jerk shack.

We eat well here most of the time. And there are many local foods that we have come to appreciate. The fruits and rums are great, of course. The Rasta vegan fare at the Vital Ital in Lucea is hearty and healthy. Anything from Queenie’s in Johnsontown is delicious. The bones of their chicken, fried or baked, are often found encased in a clamshell in the trash can next to my desk. The rice and peas served with most every Jamaican meal are a welcome change to fries. For road food, the patties and coco bread are about it – tasty, to be sure, but they tend to leave a mess of crust in your lap.

Local fare must also include the more western stuff found at the restaurants in Montego Bay, from the tofu and sausage stir-fry at Dragon Bay, to the spicy chicken fajitas at Walters, to the vindaloo at Akbars. Even the salads at the yacht club are nice. As such, we eat out often, doing what we can to support the dining industry and avoid unnecessary wear and tear to the stove at home.

Even so, there are a few local dishes that I have yet to develop a taste for, and can probably do without. Any goat for instance – too bony. The same with chicken back. The wife digs the ox tail. She also likes the soups, although sometimes they get a little too weird and/or unrecognizable to me. Cow cud soup and mannish water are two notable examples (goat head and cattle penis, anti-respectively).

What we can agree on is jerk.

The wife and I love the jerk. From our first month on island, it has been our favorite food. Not wholly dissimilar from barbeque, but much more complex. We scour the island for this gastronomic nirvana.

Essentially, jerk is meat marinated in local spice and very slowly grilled over pimento wood. [Pimento is the local term for allspice, not those slimy red things stuffed into olives.] The meat to be jerked is always chicken, usually pork, and sometimes fish or sausage. The grill is oftentimes as crude as a split oil barrel, with a wee chimney welded to the lid. This type of grill can be found all along the Negril main road, and appears on Friday and Saturday nights in towns everywhere.

At more established facilities (i.e. those with running water), the grill can be a metal grate spanning a simple two tiered block wall. Over the grate is placed closely spaced pieces of pimento wood (and other sweet woods, on occasion), stripped of its bark. The meat is placed atop the lath, and then covered with a sheet of corrugated galvanized roofing material (locally: zinc).

This is what makes the flavor so complex. Pimento coals, hot steel, green wood, meat, spice, zinc. Every jerk shack has slightly different variations to this theme, so our long time goal has been to try them all.

This informal study has resulted in the consumption of a really huge amount of beer, and a few generalities about the various styles of jerk. There is the red jerk popular at Faiths Pen, the clear escovich-like jerk of the Community Jerk Center, the black and smoky jerk which is the hallmark of De Buss, and the green Boston styled jerk which is our chicken juice and jerk sauce covered hands down favorite.

What they all have in common is the scotch bonnet pepper, a very serious little pepper with more heat per bite than 8.810 liters of jalapenos. Good jerk will also contain pimento, salt, scallion, onion, thyme, black pepper, nutmeg, and cinnamon.

The relative quantities of each of these ingredients is a secret known only to the shack, as is the exact method of marination. What is more secret is the jerk sauce, applied to the meat immediately prior to consumption. These nine ingredients are just the start of a good jerk sauce, which can have,… who really knows,… twenty, forty, a hundred different ingredients?

This is the stuff. Hotter than hot. Full of spirit. Defying your taste buds’ better sensibilities. Raring and fully able to hurt you tomorrow. Of course, if the sauce sucks, we will not return. If it is good, it wins our unflagging loyalty. In fact, we regularly trek over an hour east to Discovery Bay to stuff ourselves at our most favorite establishment, the Ultimate Jerk Center.

Served with the jerk are numerous adjuncts - breadfruit (courtesy of Captain Bligh), yam, yam (sweet potato), festival, hard dough bread, bammy, and rice and peas. The purpose of these starchy accompaniments is to cut the heat back to tolerable levels. But still, a good meal follows you through the day with a happy feeling of total bliss, caused by the intense warming of your innards.

There is a place in Kingston which delivers jerk throughout the Corporate Area. But delivered jerk is not the same as eating there. Take out, as well, pales to eating on site. A good jerk stand is smelled before it is ever seen, as the process generates huge amounts of smoke and scent (something you get to wear home at no additional charge). Having a pleasant odor is the first thing we judge at a new location. If it does not smell good from the road, I will not even bother to stop.

A well established jerk center will show in the thick layer of soot, grease and creosote collected on the ceiling over the grills. This black-brown stuff coats the rafters and light fixtures, which at night glow with the color and shade of the goodness.

Ordering and payment is made separate from the jerk chef (jerky, if you will). Once paid, the receipt is presented to the jerky through the billowing smoke, who selects the meat from underneath the sheet of zinc, flops it onto a wooden cutting board (actually a slice of a pimento log, used for years and years and probably never washed, adding the flavor of jerks past), and hacked into bite sized pieces with a machete or cleaver. Of course, this method results in a number of tiny bone shards in your food, but we quickly learned not to swallow them.

Wrapped in a square of aluminum foil, slathered in the sauce, served piping hot at an uncomfortable table with a crate of well cold and cheap beers, there is no better lunch,… or dinner,… or supper,… or mid-afternoon snack,… or midnight munchie buster.

Before we quit this place, I will make it a point to spend a number of our last hours on an extended jerk tour, monging at the Tower Jerk Center, Mackies, Scotchies, Patio Latino, Boulevard, Mister Spice, Best in the West, or Ossies, to name a few more. Once gone, we will be Jonesin’ for sure.

When that is, I still have no clue.

Irie, anyway. Enjoy your burger.