Description

Jerk chicken is a popular Jamaican seasoned chicken — either dry rub or wet-marinade this delicious blend onto your chicken for an incredibly flavorful meal! Our Niblack Jerk Seasoning is hand-blended on site with perfect proportions of flavor, warmth and Carribean feel.

Garlic, onion, thyme provide savory notes while warm ginger, nutmeg and cinnamon fill the profile mixed with a little sweet, salty, slight spice “zing.”  It is the perfect seasoning for grilling chicken and pork dishes for any occasion including adding a little Jamaican Jerk flavor to your meals, snacks, and appetizers.

Ingredients: Onion, Black Pepper, Thyme, Nutmeg, Cinnamon, Cayenne, Allspice, Ginger, Garlic, Brown Sugar, Salt, Citric Acid.

Use as a meat rub OR To make marinade, add 2 oz mix to 1/2 c. orange juice, 1/4 c. vinegar, 1/4 c. soy sauce, 1/4 c. olive oil.

 

The History of Jamaican Jerk Seasoning & Jerk Chicken

Jerk chicken is believed to have originated in a time when African meat cooking techniques were introduced to Jamaica by the Maroons. These techniques were combined with native Jamaican ingredients and seasonings used by the Arawak Indians. The method of smoking meats with spices for long periods of time served good purposes:

–keeping insects away from the raw meat

–preserving the meat longer once it has been cooked.

–introducing smoky flavors and spices into to the meat.

According to most food historians, “jerk” is the Spanish word that comes from a Peruvian word “Charqui” meaning dried strips of meat like what we call “jerky”. Most historians agree Jamaica was settled by the Arawak Indians over 2500 years ago from South America. They used similar techniques to smoke and dry meat in the sun or over a slow fire and this were common in Peru. This was important as the dried beef could be taken on journeys and eaten as is or chopped and reconstituted in boiling water.

During the early seventeenth century, the British brought slaves to Jamaica for the sugar trade and for coffee, cocoa, pimento, and other goods to merchants. A group of these slaves escaped into the mountains and were later named the Maroons. The Maroons would blend an array of spices and herbs that they would later use to marinate and cook the wild game they hunted, mostly wild boar. This led to the famous “Jamaican Jerk”. Traditional Jamaican Jerk is a method of cooking pork. Nowadays chicken, seafood or beef can be seasoned in this manner as well.  Traditional Jerk is a complex blend of seasonings including scallions, onions, scotch bonnet peppers, salt, thyme, allspice, black pepper and many other spices. all of ingredients grow on the island’s fertile green landscape.

The legendary Mecca for Jerk is the northeastern end of Jamaica. here most of the vendors have built huts over fires directly on the beach like the Maroons that came before them. The meat is cooked on pimento wood or sheets of metal used as griddles and sometimes covered with plantain leaves. The typical cooking style uses a marinade or paste that includes pimento, known as allspice and scotch bonnet peppers, similar to habanero. The meat is then marinated and slow smoked over pimento wood.