Fiery, vinegary Scotch bonnet pepper sauce, to be eaten with jerk chicken or pork.
But let’s back up a little bit, shall we? Long before jerk chicken even hits that elaborate grill setup, it’s soaked in a simple to make but complex-tasting marinade that gives the meat its sweet and spicy flavor.
If you do an internet search for jerk chicken recipes, you’re likely to find hundreds of different ideas of what goes into the traditional marinade. Some recipes call for soy sauce, some for brown sugar; some call for whole cloves, some for ground; some add hot Scotch bonnet peppers, while others add milder jalapeños; and the list goes on and on.
In Jamaica, the jerk chicken joints I visited were invariably reluctant to share exactly what goes into their house marinades, but there’s an agreed-upon formula that forms the base of the marinade, which individual cooks or restaurants will riff on, changing an ingredient here, adding another one there.
