Jamaican · Main
Brown Stew Chicken
- Intermediate
- 45 min
- roughly 2 of 4 for cost
Leads with wood-smoke running underneath, real fire that builds and stays, opening aromatic and staying there.
Ingredients
- 1.4 kg chicken, jointed into 10 pieces
- 2 tsp salt
- 2 tsp cracked black pepper
- 6 sprigs thyme
- 4 scallions, 60 g, bruised and chopped
- 3 cloves garlic, crushed
- 8 g pimento berries
- 60 g dark cane sugar
- 60 ml coconut oil
- 1 onion, 150 g, sliced
- 1 red sweet pepper, 120 g, sliced
- 1 carrot, 100 g, in coins
- 2 tbsp tomato puree
- 400 ml water
- 1 whole scotch bonnet, stem on and unpunctured
The skills inside
Allergen screen
None found among the 14 screened.
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Rub the chicken with salt, pepper, thyme, scallion, garlic and crushed pimento and leave it to season in the cold.
- Heat the coconut oil until it shimmers, tip in the sugar all at once and watch: it melts, foams amber, then darkens to mahogany and throws its first thin wisp of smoke. At that instant lay in the chicken.
- Turn the pieces in the dark oil until every one is lacquered chestnut, then lift them out onto a plate.
- Fry onion, sweet pepper, carrot and tomato puree in the same pot until the onion goes slack and the pot smells sweet rather than sharp.
- Return the chicken with the water and the whole scotch bonnet, cover and simmer until the gravy coats a spoon and the meat pulls from the bone, about 35 minutes. Lift the pepper out unbroken before it splits. 35 min
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the technique it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Reducing a sauce 95 recipes
- A steady simmer with the surface moving, never a rolling boil that throws it up the sides and scorches what is left on the base.
- Judged by behaviour rather than the clock: it coats the back of a spoon and holds a clean line when a finger is drawn through it.
- The drop in volume is visible against the side of the pan: there is a line to see, not a guess about whether anything has happened.
- Seasoned at the end and not the beginning, because salt concentrates at exactly the rate everything else does.
- Nothing is catching underneath: a spoon drawn across the base comes up clean, with no browned film building where the heat is fiercest.
Where it goes wrong It was seasoned at the start and then reduced by half. The salt concentrated along with everything else, so the sauce reaches perfect body and is too salty to serve. And the only remedy is to dilute it and reduce it all over again.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Off-dry Riesling (Mosel Kabinett)
- Also Right
- Gewürztraminer or off-dry Chenin
- From the Taps
- Crisp lager or pilsner
- Zero-Proof
- Agua fresca or iced jasmine tea
Sugar, cold, and low alcohol are the fire code: sweetness tames capsaicin while acid resets the palate; tannin would fan the flames.
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