Jerk Chicken with Roast Peppers

Here’s a really tasty and spicy way to jazz up some chicken and peppers. It’s based on a recipe I obtained from Simon and Tim on TV’s Sunday Brunch programme, which I’ve developed in my usual manner. Once the pieces are cooked, you can enjoy them in various ways: hot with rice, cold with salad or – my favourite – as a filling in a tortilla wrap.

I reported a few posts back that I had opened a new channel for A Different Kitchen on Instagram. I decided to teach myself some reel making skills with this dish, which was enormous fun. I’ll say more about that shortly. First of all, let’s focus on the food!

Servings

This depends on how you intend to serve it, but you will get 4 chicken breasts worth of spicy, meaty goodness to eat as you please.

Timings

15 mins to make the marinade, 12 hours to rest in the fridge, then 25 mins to cook.

You Will Need

• 4 chicken breasts, cut into chunks
• 1 red and 1 yellow pepper, also cut into pieces
• olive oil

For the Marinade:

• 1 onion, chopped
• 3 scallions, chopped
• 1 chilli, chopped
• 1 garlic clove, crushed
• 1 tbsp 5 Spice powder
• 1 tbsp allspice berries
• 1 tsp ground nutmeg
• 1 tsp dried thyme
• 100ml dark soy sauce
• 50ml veg oil
• a few twists of sea salt and black pepper

Method

1. Combine all the marinade ingredients in a bowl. Tip in the chicken chunks and coat all over. Leave in the fridge for 12 hours, then take out.
2. Place the chopped peppers in a dish. Drizzle the oil over and roast in the oven at 180C for 25 mins.
3. While the peppers are roasting, tip the chicken pieces and all the marinade into a large frying pan and place on a high heat. Turn the pieces until they are cooked through and the marinade has become a sticky, saucy coating.
4. When the peppers are done, tip them into the pan and stir in with the chicken so that they are also coated in the spicy sauce. Serve hot or cold.

Customise It!

There are various ways you can cook and serve this. Come the summertime, I fancy threading the marinaded chicken and pepper pieces on skewers for roasting on the BBQ.

On this occasion, I opted to roll some of the cooked chicken and peppers up in a soft, warmed tortilla wrap along with a mango salsa (that I will show you how to make in my next post!)

As I say, I made this the subject of a reel over on my new Instagram channel – you can find it on @differentkitch. I had great fun, and learned a lot in the process – probably the main lesson being to shoot in portrait mode on my camera phone for Instagram, rather than the landscape that I am more accustomed to using over here. I’ve since corrected this in my subsequent reels.

Although jerk chicken is Caribbean-inspired, I felt wrapping it in a flour tortilla gave it a Tex Mex kind of feel. So, when it came to choosing an audio track for my reel, I opted for ZZ Top and Gimme All Your Lovin’. Someone commented that the guys in the band would be pleased the chicken, peppers and other bits were wrapped up in the tortilla, as it meant no stray pieces of food would get tangled up in their trademark long beards. I hadn’t really thought of that, tbh, but you have to say – fair point.

Here’s ZZ Top with Gimme All Your Lovin’.