JAMAICAN JERK SEASONING

Last fall I really had all intentions to make a Jamaican Jerk seasoning. I wanted to expand on my Caribbean recipes. I already can a really good jamming jerk sauce.

For months I have researched and looked at numerous recipes. As usual, I still wound up making my own thing. I just can not help myself. It is not that I think I can come up with something better, goodness I am not that vain at all. I just like to make stuff to my taste buds. That is why I try to mention that every recipe is to your taste. Feel free to have fun and make changes when cooking. After all, cooking should be fun, so make it that way. I promise you that if you apply this theory to your kitchen you will enjoy cooking a bit more.

I love to make my own spice and seasoning blends and an added bonus is the fact that I grow my own herbs. I have found the more I play around with making my own seasoning blends the better I love the fact that I do not have to buy something in the stores that are full of preservatives and sodium. Since most of my herbs are homegrown I also am able to eliminate pesticides. Can you say that when you buy a bottle or packet seasoning in the store? Another reason to make your own is the fact that they are so much more flavorful.

Jamaican Jerk whether it is a sauce or a seasoning mix has such complex flavors by combining heat, spice and sweet. I have been a bit amazed at how well cinnamon and nutmeg goes well with garlic, thyme, and peppers. Honestly, when I first made my jerk sauce I was leary. I could not wrap my head around the idea of using cinnamon and nutmeg on meat.

One thing I found in all my research is most recipes do not even use the correct pepper powder in their jerk seasoning. Goodness, people what are you thinking? Seriously, one of the key ingredients in jerk is the scotch bonnet pepper. How can you make an authentic sauce or seasoning blend without the use of scotch bonnets?

In several of my blog posts, I have mentioned this pretty little pumpkin pepper. Of course, the scotch bonnet has nothing to do with pumpkins but they do look like tiny pumpkins. Scotch Bonnet peppers are fruity but hot. They are between 80,000 and 400,000 on the Scoville scale.

This year we only had one scotch bonnet pepper plant. While that plant did well, it has been beaten up with storms and we have lost a couple of the main limbs of the plant.

Needless to say, we did not get tons of peppers but I guess we got enough. On a positive note, I have a couple of gallons bags frozen from last year. Knowing I wanted to make this seasoning blend I took a few of our fresh ones and dehydrated them.