Eat The Right Thing (#105)

This month's film was Do The Right Thing. I had never seen this film, but I watched the trailer and saw that the film was about racial tensions between the black and Italian communities within New York. I also saw that a big part of the film was focused on Sal's Pizzeria. Though not stated anywhere explicitly, I noticed a lot of Jamaican themes as well.

This made choosing our dinner theme pretty straight forward. I decided on doing an Italian-Jamaican fusion dish by making a New York style pizza with Jamaican flavors and toppings. Once I started looking at popular Jamaican dishes, the one that jumped out to me was jerk chicken. I felt like this would make a great pizza topping. I did look up jerk chicken pizza and saw a couple different varieties. Ultimately, I did my own thing following some of their tips and suggestions.

Jamaican Style Jerk Chicken Barbecue Pizza

For this dish, there are some things that you will need to keep in mind. For safety reasons, your chicken will need to be cooked separately before building the pizza. To make sure everything else works well, I would suggest also cooking the veggies on their own. Otherwise you risk some toppings being either under or overcooked. For this dish, I used a premade pizza crust from the grocery store. If you decide to make your own pizza dough, you should also precook that a bit before adding the other ingredients. The final cooking of the pizza is really just to melt the cheese and toast the crust and toppings.

The goal for this dish was to make a pizza that captured the Jamaican flavors. Specifically, I was going for smokey, sweet, and spicy. Authentic jerk chicken is grilled or smoked over Pimento wood which is not available where I live, but the internet says has smokey and sweet flavor. I do have a pellet smoker, so I used a wood blend that had some smokey wood and some sweet wood.

The international section of my grocery store has a Jamaican and Caribbean section, so I was able to find a quality marinade for the chicken. There are lots of sauces and spices that use the name jerk, but based on my research, an authentic jerk sauce needs to contain scotch bonnet peppers. Below is the brand marinade that I used. It was extremely flavorful. I also bought some basic jerk spice, which I added to the veggies when grilling to give them a little extra flavor.

The jerk chicken and veggies provided most of the smoke and spice flavors. For the sweet flavor, I used a honey barbecue sauce as the sauce of my pizza. This should also add a little smokiness. I also got hot honey, which we drizzled on top of the pizza before serving for more sweetness and spice.

The rest of the pizza was pretty traditional, with mozzarella cheese and parmesan. I also made some garlic butter with butter, garlic, and salt and brushed it onto the crust to give it a little flavor. Below is step by step breakthrough of how I made these pizzas.

Ingredients:

1 lb chicken tenderloins (could also use breast or thighs, but you should tenderize first)

12 oz Jamaican jerk marinade

1 sweet onion

1 red bell pepper

8 oz Baby Bella sliced mushrooms

1 pint of small sweet grape tomatoes or something similar
olive oil
premade pizza crusts (or homemade crusts that are partially cooked)
sweet and smokey barbecue sauce (such as honey barbecue)
4 tbsp butter
garlic powder
salt

parmesan cheese

4 cups mozzarella cheese

chopped scallions

hot honey

Directions:

1. Put chicken in a gallon size ziplock bag and add some of the jerk marinade. Mix or shake to make sure that all of the chicken is evenly coated. It doesn't take as much marinade as you might think. I would suggest using only 3 or 4 oz. You will need the rest of the marinade later. Place the bag in the fridge to marinate. I marinated mine for two days. You could do less, but I would recommend at least a day.
2. If you are using a pellet smoker like me, load it up with a smokey and sweet pellet mixture and set it to Smoke setting, which is usually the lowest temp. If you don't have a smoker, put your grill at a low temp. Low and slow is the goal for cooking the chicken. Put the chicken on the grill or smoker and cook for a half hour.
3. After a half hour, flip your chicken and brush more marinade on each piece using a basting brush. Turn the temp up just a little and smoke for another half hour. After each half hour, repeat these steps, remembering to flip, baste, and raise the temp each time. You can stop raising the temp once the smoker temp reaches about 225 Fahrenheit. Continue cooking in this way until the chicken is cooked to an eternal temperature of 160 degrees Fahrenheit.
4. Remove the chicken and allow to rest.
   
   
   
5. Crank the temperature of the smoker to high and put a grilling pan in it that is capable of withstanding high temps. The one I use has holes in it which allows the smoke to penetrate.
6. While the smoker and pan are heating up, prep your vegetables. The onions and pepper should be sliced. Tomatoes should be halved long ways.
7. Once veggies have been prepared, put them in bowls and toss with olive oil. For my pizzas, I decided that I was going to top one with onion and pepper and the other with mushroom and tomato, so I put them in separate bowls and cooked them separately.
8. Take a bowl of veggies out to the grill and dump them in the pan. Add some jerk seasoning as you sauté them for flavor. If you are using a smoker, you should leave it closed most of the time and only open on occasion to stir and mix the veggies. Continue until veggies are soft and cooked completely.
   
   
   
9. Move veggies to a plate. If you cook veggies separately like I did, do Step 8 again with the next batch.
10. By now, all chicken and veggies should be cooked. Leave the smoker on high. We will need it later. Chop the chicken into bite size pieces.
    
    
    
11. On your pre-made pizza crusts, add a thin layer of barbecue sauce and spread all the way to the crust.
    
    
    
12. Put butter in a bowl and microwave for 30 seconds to melt. Mix in garlic and salt to taste. Using a basting brush, brush all of the exposed crust with this garlic butter.
13. Lightly sprinkle parmesan cheese over the buttered crust and sauce.
14. Add mozzarella to cover the sauce. I made two pizzas and used 2 cups per pizza. You could use less cheese, but the cheese and garlic were the only ingredients that you would find in a typical New York pizza, so I wanted there to be enough enough cheese that this would feel like a fusion dish and not just a Jamaican dish. *Coincidentally there are a few scenes in the movie where people ask for "extra cheese" so making it extra cheesy fit the film as well.*
15. Add your chicken and sautéed vegetables to each pizza as desired and place back on smoker. Since the toppings are all precooked, you only need to cook it long enough for the cheese to melt and the crust to get crispy. This will probably take at least ten minutes. Keep the smoker closed except to check on it. Cooking it in the smoker adds more smoke flavor to the pizza, but also gives you a crispy bottom similar to what you would get from a stone pizza oven in a pizzeria.
    
    
    
16. You're not done yet. Before serving the pizzas, top with fresh, chopped scallions and drizzle with hot honey. That's the final touch. Serve and enjoy.

This dish came out really well. All of my guests enjoyed it. I was afraid that the spice level might be too high, but it was actually pretty well balanced from the sweetness of the honey and barbecue sauce, which complimented the dish well without overpowering it.

Jamaican Italian Ice

For dessert, I decided to stick to the Italian-Jamaican fusion idea. My grocery store sells several different flavors of Italian Ice, which is a dessert also featured in the movie. I decided that I wanted to use these but add some Caribbean flair. I found a delicious coconut cream topping sold at my grocery, shown below.

The coconut cream was perfect for what I was looking for, but I wanted more options, so I also bought a tropical juice that I found in the Caribbean section of my grocery store with the plan to turn it into a syrup topping. The juice that I bought was a sorrel and ginger juice because those are unique flavors that I felt would stand out against the fruity flavors of the Italian Ice.

To turn a juice into a syrup is fairly simple, provided you get your timing right.

Ingredients:

2 cups caribbean juice

2 cups sugar

Directions:

1. Heat up juice and sugar in a pot.
2. Stir with wooden spatula until dissolved.
3. Increase heat to a low simmer. Stir frequently.
4. Once you notice the liquid has started sticking to the spoon, remove from heat. It will thicken as it cools. Timing is everything here. If you undercook this, it will still be a liquid. If you overcook it, it becomes hard candy. You won't really know the consistency until it cools completely.
5. Move the liquid to your serving dish or squeeze bottle before it cools completely. Store in fridge.

Both the syrup and the coconut cream were tasty and paired well with the Italian Ice. Italian Ice is pretty good by itself, but are a bit of single note dish. This was a great way to liven them up and give them an exciting twist.

Overall, the food was a big hit and so was the dessert. I definitely plan to make jerk chicken again using that marinade and I also plan to keep that coconut cream on hand for dessert and drinks. It was really tasty. Both the meal and the dessert tied in well with the film as well. It did exactly what I wanted it to do as far as fusing New York Italian and Jamaican American cuisine.

As for the film, it was good, but less harmonious than the food. It focused a lot of racial tension and did not have the happy ending that we are used to in these kinds of movies. Still worth the watch though.