Jamaica
Spices & Cuisine
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Jamaican Flavours
Jamaican flavours are a feast for the tastebuds; Jamaican flavours are all about bursts of fresh seasonal fruit and warm earthy spices. Jamaica is home to many ingredients we use in day-to-day life with a temperate, tropical climate, including sugar, coconuts, and cocoa beans. Being an island by the sea, fish is super-popular and widely used, particularly their national saltfish. One of their most famous and renowned foods is jerk cuisine. Both a cooking method and a flavour combination of Jamaican herbs and spices, including sweet allspice, savoury thyme, and super-hot scotch bonnet chillies, Jamaican Jerk Spice is used to marinate meats like chicken and pork and seafood like prawns and fish. Often served with a zesty, fresh salsa of pineapple and lime and sides of beans, rice, and plantains (savoury bananas), it is an intoxicating mix of all the cultures that have influenced and inhabited this unique Caribbean Island.
History & Influences
Traditional Jamaican food includes a mixture of cooking techniques, flavours, and spices influenced by American Indian, African, Irish, English, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Indian, Chinese, and Middle Eastern people who have inhabited the island over its rich history. The heavy influence of African cuisine, as a result of waves of slavery in the 1700s, saw the introduction of spices and peppers to both season meat and preserve it, breadfruit, ackee, and root vegetables as a cheap source of sustenance, and grains like wheat and maize to make flatbreads. Before the colonization of Jamaica, food in Jamaican culture revolved heavily around maize, potatoes, peanuts, and papaya. These ingredients are still prominent. However, Spanish, Creole, Caribbean, and African influences have brought new flavours to the region, including spices, peppers, and other fruits and meat. Rastafarians have a vegetarian approach to preparing food, cooking, and eating and have introduced unique vegetarian dishes to Jamaican cuisine. Rastafarians do not eat pork. However, pork is a very popular dish in Jamaican cuisine.
What is Jamaican cuisine?
Given the tropical climate and humid atmosphere, Jamaica is an ideal growing environment for peppers, thyme, chillies, allspice, and coriander. A range of peppers and chillies, all varying in spice, colour, and flavour, are grown, produced and used fresh, dried, whole, and ground on their own and create Jamaican spice blends like Jamaican Jerk Rub. Before the Spanish colonized this small Caribbean Island, Jamaicans’ diets predominantly centred around locally grown maize, peanuts, potatoes, and papaya. While these ingredients are still widely used in Jamaican cuisine, the introduction of Spanish, Creole, African and neighbouring Caribbean cuisines brought many staple ingredients used in Jamaican traditional food today, including spices, braised and barbecued meats, and fruits and peppers. When the British settled, bread and pastries were introduced. Namely, their take on the Cornish pasty, the beef patty, which is still a popular street eat today.
Recipes
Iconic Jamaican Dishes
Encompassing all the taste sensations of the Caribbean, Jamaican foods are fresh, vibrant, and full of flavour, combining punchy jerk-marinated meats with fresh fruity salsas of local pineapple and herbs or traditional grilled saltfish with their vibrant Ackee fruit, plump tomatoes, chillies, and fragrant spices. Locally distilled rum is served all over, and sweet treats of chewy coconut drops are enjoyed alongside Jamaica’s famous coffee.
Jamaican spices
Given the tropical climate and humid atmosphere, Jamaica is an ideal growing environment for crops like peppers, thyme, chillies, allspice, and coriander. A range of peppers and chillies, all varying in spice, colour and flavour, is grown and produced and used fresh, dried, whole, and ground.
Jamaican Jerk
A sweet and spicy blend of pimento, allspice, and nutmeg with savoury notes of garlic and thyme, Jamaican Jerk is one of the Caribbean’s most iconic dishes. Originally named after the cooking technique of ‘jerking’ in open-ground pits filled with smoking-hot coals, Jerk has become a flavour in its own right and its rich intensity achieves wonderfully smoky results without the need for a piping-hot coal pit.
Flavours of the world
Comprising 6 regions, 12 countries (and counting) and 48+ delicious accompanying recipes, Flavours of the World opens the doors to the world’s spice route and allows everyone to explore the countries and cuisines that have shaped our culinary world today. Sugar-free, filler-free, and preservative-free, our blends make cooking wholesome, authentic meals from around the globe simple and affordable; offering step-by-step instructions and a catalogue of free online recipes to suit all diets.
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