Other than dousing my chips in reggae reggae sauce, I couldn't really say that my cooking up to now has ventured much into the realm of the Caribbean. It's not that I don't like it - Jamie's Jerk Chicken recipe was one of my favourites in the 30 minute meals book - it just doesn't really get a lot of coverage over here. So I was quite excited to try out this 15 minute meal version and see whether it would really cut the mustard - or cut the scotch bonnet if you like.
If it did work, it would be something of a miracle - a typical jerk pork or chicken recipe would marinade the meat in the sauce for a good few hours (check out this Jamie recipe) and even the 30 minute meal version bakes the chicken in the oven with the sauce to infuse the flavours a bit more. Here, the meat and sauce are being cooked completely separately and don't even come into contact with each other until you are about to plate up. I've also had mixed fortunes with pork fillet - I seem to either undercook it or overcook it but rarely get it anywhere approaching bang on.
The jerk pork part of the dish is actually really simple - you just slice up and flatten the pork and fry it in some oil, and blitz the sauce in the liquidizer. Meanwhile you get to work on the salad which proves much more tricky. First you have to find an oven proof bowl. I have various bowls but the only one I was confident would be oven proof was a pyrex casserole dish which was a little on the small side. You line it with tortillas and then bake it in the oven. It doesn't really work - the top crisps up, but around the bottom it is just warmed through. It would be better, but more time consuming, to fashion the tortillas into bowl shapes and cook them individually.
Once again, it's a little disappointing. The pork was a little overcooked (I'll take full responsibility for that) but the real let down was the sauce - with 6 tomatoes in it, it tastes more like a salsa than a jerk sauce. It's not unpleasant, but just wasn't really what I was hoping for. The salad was ok though - the lime and olive oil dressing was nice and it all went well with the (semi) crispy tortillas and the crunchy, charred corn. Unfortunately it was missing the avocado - Waitrose's supposedly "perfectly ripe" avocado was neither perfect nor ripe. They will be getting an angry tweet.
Lolz gave the dish 7/10. Difficulty rating 4/10.
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