It’s the end of the summer and the corn is going cheap. I bought four cobs for a quid in Peckham yesterday and a frankly quite staggering twelve red peppers for the same. Twelve. Not joking.

This soup only uses one you’ll be pleased to know, along with two cobs and some classic Caribbean flavours: thyme, scotch bonnet chilli and coconut. It’s a hearty mix, thickened with yellow split peas and potato but my version is light compared with other recipes which use pumpkin or squash and other vegetables. I prefer a fresher version which keeps the focus on the juicy bursts of corn. I strip one cob and slice the other so I’m not denied the pleasure of gnawing on it.

The scotch bonnet chilli is left whole and slit lengthways to release just moderate fruity heat and the creamy coconut milk smooths things over. It tastes tropical and most importantly, it celebrates the corn. At that price, it would be rude not to.

Jamaican Corn Soup

1 large onion, diced
2 cloves garlic, finely chopped
1 scotch bonnet chilli
150g yellow split peas
1 litre stock (I used vegetable)
400ml tin of coconut milk
2 sprigs of thyme
2 cobs corn
1 red pepper, diced
1 large potato, diced

Heat a couple of tablespoons of vegetable or groundnut oil in a pan and add the onion. Let it sweat over a lowish heat for about 8 minutes then add the garlic for a couple of minutes more, taking care not to let it burn. Make a cut down the length of the chilli, but keep it intact and add it to the pan with the split peas, thyme and stock – simmer for 30 minutes.

Prepare the corn by shaving the kernels from one of the cobs, running your knife down the sides, top to bottom. Slice the other one into 2cm thick slices (I nicked that idea from this recipe recently. I also nicked their presentation). Add the corn, coconut milk and potato and simmer for 10-15 minutes. Add the red pepper for the final 5 minutes. Season with salt and pepper.

Allow the soup to cool a little then remove the chilli, thyme and corn slices (reserve the corn slices) and blend half the soup. If it is still quite hot then make sure not to fill the blender more than half way and hold the lid down because if you don’t you will end up with soup all over your kitchen. It will blast the lid off the blender. Return to the pan and add back the corn slices. Reheat if necessary, adjust the seasoning and serve.

I snubbed breakfast and arrived absolutely ravenous and half an hour an hour early for the Jerk Cook Out. I wanted to get the measure of the place, formulate a plan of attack and talk to some of the cooks. As the meat hit the grill and the smoke started twisting above the trees though, I got impatient and began repeatedly texting and calling my friends until one of them turned up; some pleasantries were exchanged (“how are you?” “yes yes fine whatever so let’s go to this place first then this then this…”) and we were off.

Tasty Jerk have won the competition two years running. I asked them if they fancied their chances but the answer came that they were just in it for kicks; if you win twice in a row then you have to take a year off. We got stuck right into some of their jerk pork belly. The fat was like eating the pork scratchings of my dreams. I like a touch more cloves in the mix but the allspice was prominent enough and I wonder if they put berries in the coals to infuse the smoke. As styles go it was more dry rub than sticky glaze but there was skill in the cooking and confidence in the spice.

There are different styles of jerk; there’s the all-in-one marinade and then the dry rub and glaze. I want to experiment with the latter. Some places seemed to be serving the meat with a sweeter sauce on the side. Last year’s runners up Jerk Lan took this approach, with disappointing results. Their sign urged us to ASK FOR SPECIAL SAUCE and so of course we did, which was a shame because it ruined the meat. I was thinking hot pepper paste with a kick to rival a donkey but instead we got saccharine gloop which seemed to be a mixture of the worst sweet and sour sauce of my life, sugar syrup and water. We could only judge the meat by licking the crusted remnants of chicken skin from the corners of our mouths, which, incidentally, were good and garlicky.

Over a swift pint of Meantime Pale Ale at The Florence it was time to re-group and digest before riding back on the second wind. My friend enjoyed our third portion better, although I can’t say I thought much of it. The real surprise came in the form of a spit roasted lamb, again from Tasty Jerk. Shards of crunchy skin and fat with a proper heat elevated to an out of body experience by the accompanying chilli sauce.

The lurid artificial hue of a drink is directly proportional to its level of efficacy in quenching the fire in your mouth. Everyone should know this. A couple of Slush Puppies the colour of 1980′s neon legwarmers brought us back from the endorphin super highway. Thought you’d turned your back on the SP at ten years of age? Think again.

The problem with an event getting bigger of course, is that quality becomes diluted. Our pork and lamb were great, although I did know of them and make a beeline. A later impulsive purchase of curry goat was watery and timidly spiced but there were so many places to choose from, it was hard to know where to start over-indulging. When considering this conundrum, it seemed that my only chink of light would come in the form of my judging the competition, so that I could visit each and every stall. I would systematically work the field, savouring each nugget of pork, fish and chicken like it was my last before slipping peacefully into a jerk coma.

And then I’d wake up.

The annual Jerk Cook Out Festival takes place in Brockwell Park (formerly Horniman Museum) in August. Dates vary so keep an eye out. This year’s event ran from 12-6pm.

If you like jerk check out my jerk recipe and my top tips for great jerk.

My event of the summer. I’ve been to The Jerk Cook Out competition for the past three years and every time it gets bigger and (in most ways) better; so much so in fact that this year it has moved from the gardens of The Horniman Museum, to the larger and much more suitable, Brockwell Park. The Horniman gardens, although lovely, are hilly and the stalls were forced to spread out; you could never really get the measure of the place. Planning your course around multiple jerk stalls is a serious business and one needs to size up the scale of the challenge. You could never do them all though, we’re talking a week’s worth of eatin’ out there.

Jerk chicken, pork belly, fish and crab claws. Rice and peas, plantains and fresh coconut water. Rum. Music. My advice is to get there early (the queues can get a bit silly) and to go seriously hungry, because one plate of jerk is never enough.

When: Sunday 15th August, 12pm-6pm
Where: Brockwell Park, (Dulwich, SE24 9AE)
Cost: Free entry, then you obviously pay for the jerk.

The question I get asked the most when shopping on Rye Lane is, “do you actually eat those chilli peppers?!” This usually comes from a man of Caribbean background of a certain age; they’re always amazed that this little White English girl even knows what jerk is, let alone makes it in her own home. Cue smiles, wistful eyes and tales from the tropics. Don’t even think about asking for a recipe though, it’s a short cut to the end of the conversation.

I don’t claim to have the best jerk recipe out there; I still aspire to the heady heights of Smokey Jerkey in New Cross, but I have learned a thing or two about cooking it through repeated mistakes, research and tips that people send to me. Here are those things, in a list. A list! With bullet points and everything.

• Grind your own allspice berries; makes all the difference. It’s all about freshness with spices; ready-ground have the tendency to taste dusty and lose pungency. Pestle the berries yourself in a mortar, they crush easily and you get to suck up the scent while you pound.

• Use a lot of sugar in your recipe. This tip I picked up from Josh. It was one of those beautiful moments when you work out what your recipe has been missing. I also add a tablespoon of molasses to mine, which gives a dark, sticky quality. Thanks to Laura for that one.
• Don’t ever, EVER be tempted to use different chillies in place of scotch bonnets. SB’s are the cornerstone of jerk flavour; no other pepper has the same fruity tingle. Just be careful when preparing them and de-seed if you like (I do) . There are actually quite a few varieties of Caribbean chilli (e.g. Trinidad Scorpion, Billy Goat, Jamaican Gold), but we only seem to get the one variety here.
• Always marinate overnight.
• Don’t use too much sauce. It’s tempting to leave a thick layer on when you’re grilling but don’t, it will just burn. If you’ve given it a good marinating overnight then the flavour should have seeped right in and all that’s left to do is cook it properly…

• Cook on a BBQ. The major problem with cooking jerk at home is the lack of a cooking drum. This is a barrel turned on its side and mounted on legs, basically (see above). The jerk is grilled over coals like a BBQ.
• This is an absolute blinder of a tip – sent on to me by a reader (cheers Joe). Those tantalising wafts of smoke you get coming from the jerk drums?  They come from spritzing the coals – with BEER. This creates more smoke which you can then seal inside with your meat or fish.
• Same reader, second awesome pointer: throw some soaked pimento (allspice) berries into the coals so when you spray them with the BEER, they sizzle and flavour the smoke.
• And finally, I find it best to use the indirect BBQ cooking method because this recipe has a lot of sugar in it and any direct flame with burn the shizzle out of it. Build your coals in a pyramid shape in the centre of the BBQ, then when they are lit, leave until they turn white. At this point you can move them to the sides of the BBQ, put your meat in the centre of the grill and put the lid on. The heat will circulate inside but there will be no fat dripping onto coals and therefore no flaring. You can also cook large joints of meat in this way.

And so ends the summary of my jerk-cooking know-how. Now come on, I know there are some tips tingling on your fingertips right now. I can sense it. Tell me.

You can find my current jerk recipe here and I must remind you that The Food Event of The Year is coming up soon – The Jerk Cookout Festival. If you look at my post about it last year, then you’ll see a comment from Joe, who heard a rumour about it being moved to Brockwell Park this year, having outgrown its usual venue – the gardens of The Horniman Museum in Forest Hill. Watch this space. I’m all over it.

I’m not talking about the annual restaurant festival in Regent’s Park, but a project by an art student called Junior Monney (awesome name), who’s studying graphic design at The University of The Arts. The idea of the project is that Junior visits Londoners in their own homes and they cook him a meal and have a little chat about their own food history. He therefore builds up a picture of the stories behind food choices. This of course encompasses culture, personal experience, individual taste and the practical and emotional. He said he had some difficulty with the project as most people were wary of letting a stranger into their home. Me being a person who meets people ‘off the internet’ all the time however, invited him right in without question and crossed my fingers he wasn’t an axe murderer.

Turned out he was just a really lovely bloke. Phew. I’d decided to make him some of my salt fish fritters; they’re simple, Peckham-themed and – being finger food – dodge the major problem that is me not having a dining table. What a right royal pain in the rear that is. I also had another motive though, which was to update the recipe with an accompanying sweetcorn salsa.

I served them with a spicy tomato sauce last time, which was nice, but no match for those juicy sweet kernels. Mint, coriander and lime juice kept it fresh. Junior seemed to enjoy them anyway, and even took one home for his mum. I told you he was a lovely bloke.

We had fun cooking, eating, filming, drinking beer and taking pictures of each other taking pictures. If you want to see the films that Junior made then go here – there’s a woman cooking some frankly rather massive rhubarb; beef bourguinon with a Caribbean twist; some interesting photos of Vaisakhi celebrations in Southall and a vegan guy cooking Trinidadian oxtail soup for his family.

The film about my fritters is on that home page too. Personally, I can’t bear to watch it because I think I look and sound weird, which bodes well for my upcoming film updates for my Big Peckham Lunch. The flipcam has arrived, and I’m ready to roll. These things can only get easier, I assume. Even if you feel the need to mute my rambling though,  there’s some footage of Peckham Rye on there which is worth a gander. Did I mention I love Peckham?* Oh right.

An excellent idea for a project I think you’ll agree; I’m very pleased to have been able to help out with it. People and food are surely the two best things to be interested in and I’m filled with confidence that Junior will breeze through that degree and then some. I wish him the very best of luck.

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Sweetcorn Salsa to go with Salt Fish Fritters

I er, didn’t write anything down. I used a large tin of sweetcorn, which I drained and heated in a dry pan first, until the liquid cooked off and it started to toast and colour; a small handful each coriander and mint leaves, chopped; 1/2 a red bell pepper, diced; 1/2 a red chilli, chopped and the juice of 1 lime. Mix it all together. Oh and salt and pepper. I think that’s it. Taste and adjust, that’s the way to do it.

* I was very pleased to see my love of Peckham in print in The Times last week – see crumpled piece of paper below.

You could say I’m fond of jerk, but you’d be making one hell of an understatement. The Jerk Cookout Festival has been my event of the year for the past three and I’ve struggled the rest of the time to make a solid version at home. Smokey Jerkey in New Cross (one of the best) and various places in Brixton and Peckham fill other gaps.

Caribbean ingredients are piled high on every reasonable bit of pavement here and you could buy the ingredients for a jerk marinade in almost every food store on Peckham Rye; which one you choose depends on personal preference. I’ve been here about a year and half now and I’ve fallen completely in love with the ramshackle collation that is Khan’s Bargain Limited and the lively stalls on Choumert Road.

I never stop being amused by the interest from Jamaican people who seldom fail to spot the ingredient combination in my hands and stop me mid-browse to ask what I’m cooking. For some reason ‘soup’ is always their first guess. You say you’re making jerk and eyes flicker with excitement. They love the fact you’re loving jerk but at the same time you can forget the idea of ever getting a hint at their recipe. Great jerk recipes are guarded like treasure. They are highly personal. You know the exciting ones are always the product of many tweaks over many years, passed between relatives and best friends who keep it locked against their chests like a family jewel.

A few months ago now my friend introduced me to Josh’s recipe and I was intrigued by the fairly large amount of sugar it. It made me think about what my jerk had been lacking – stickiness.

It was one of those situations where you kick yourself for not realising what the obvious and crucial omission has always been. What I had before was always hanging on the side of being a raw flavour base; kind of like eating a curry paste on its own with no sauce. The use of dark sugar melts the lot down to a fruity, perfumed glaze that chars at the edges into delicious smoky nuggets.

I used three de-seeded scotch bonnets and the heat was pretty spot on; the warm and tingling hum allows for a dollop of hot pepper sauce if it tickles your fancy. I served it with a white cabbage slaw with nigella seeds, not because it was the best match but because I had a lot leftover from the day before. It is one of my favourite accompaniments to grilled tandoori chicken.

The jerk was my most successful attempt to date; thank you Josh for the inspiration. Nothing more satisfying than moving along a long term recipe commitment. There is always one major problem with cooking jerk at home though and that is the fact that most of us will never own a proper steel drum ‘jerk pan’, although believe me when I say that once I have my own garden, I will build one. Until that day, a BBQ is the best bet.

Jerk Chicken

[EDIT DECEMBER 2011: I now have a new and even further improved jerk recipe, which I shall reveal soon. Hopefully in a very exciting way!]

1.5 tablespoons allspice
100g dark packed brown sugar
4 garlic cloves
1 tablespoon thyme leaves
1 bunch large spring onions (about 5)
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon nutmeg
1/2 teaspoon ground ginger
1/2 teaspoon ground cloves
3 scotch bonnet chillies, deseeded
Juice of 2 large limes
1 tsp salt
Black pepper

Chicken pieces (I used 2 legs and 2 breasts)

Blend all the marinade ingredients together and smother over the chicken rubbing well in. I use gloves for this, as I do when I chop the scotch bonnets. Refrigerate overnight.

Allow to come to room temperature and brush off most of the excess marinade before grilling on the BBQ. To set up your BBQ for the indirect method, light the coals in the middle in a kind of volcano shape then wait for the flames to disappear, leaving you with coals which have a light grey ash coating. Move them to the sides. This gets the indirect heat circulating around the kettle when you put the lid on. I find it helps to also brush the grill with a little oil. The chicken pieces will probably take about 30 minutes (although it depends on size) – always check the juices run clear.

To cook in the oven, place in a baking tray and cook at 190C for 30-40 minutes, or until the skin is crisp and the juices run clear.

White Cabbage Slaw with Nigella Seeds

This is a perfect match for Tandoori chicken, not so much jerk.

1 medium sized white cabbage, shredded
1 yellow pepper, grated
60ml red wine vinegar
55g sugar
1 tablespoon mustard
1 teaspoon nigella (onion) seeds

Mix it all together and let the mixture sit for a few hours. Serve.

I was worried that me and callaloo were doomed from the start. The soup always seems to contain a healthy amount of okra and I had a problem with this for two reasons: firstly, those hairy little fingers irritate the hell out of my (thankfully not so hairy) little fingers, bringing me out in a rash, and secondly, most callaloo recipes called for them to simmer in the liquid for at least half an hour. This to me says one thing and one thing only: slime. Eating overcooked okra is like eating a fat slimy bogey; a big glutinous bowl of snot soup. Yum. Can’t wait.

After a bit of mental wrestling I came to the conclusion that omitting them entirely was not acceptable and so I fried the sappy slices until they were sappy no more, sealed instead by a crispy outer crust. They were added back at the last minute. Other than these (literally) irritating beasties, the soup contains pork, prawns, scotch bonnet chilli, thyme, two types of onion and of course, the callaloo. I think it’s safe to say there’s a lot going on.

The flavour of the callaloo, which I bought tinned, is described somewhere on the great interwebz as, ‘a cross between spinach and cabbage’. That is exactly what it tastes like. Perhaps there’s a bit of asparagus in there as well. You get the idea. This predominantly ‘green’ flavour, makes for a very vegetal soup. At first. Then comes pork and then, even-better-joy-of-joys, pork fat; melty pieces cling to each pink nugget with a seductive wobble. There is the odd surprise of shrimp but it’s not unpleasant.

At first I find the soup musty but as the spoonfuls pass this transforms into an intriguing peppery complexity. The coconut milk is not really discernible as its usual overwhelming self but instead sort of lingers around keeping things in order. The okra keep themselves to themselves.

There’s no getting away from it – this is some seriously hearty fare and I’m amazed that it is usually served as a side dish, to act as a sort of gravy for other foods. Most of my Rye Lane dishes have been similar in weight and intensity. They are the kind of dishes that stick to your ribs; fortify, bolster and sustain.

That said, this soup also has an aromatic quality from the little love triangle going on between chilli, coconut and thyme; a surprising delicacy underneath it all really. But then that was the problem right there: so much in the mix, so many flavours and contrasts that all got a little bit muddy and confused. I really should have started with a simple version (no meat or fish) like the family recipe sent to me by a friend and blogger yesterday.

Although I enjoyed the taste of the callaloo vegetable itself, I’m not sure I’ll be cooking with it that often. A green leafy vegetable from a tin is not really any contender for fresh spinach, kale or chard for example. Well, my version isn’t anyway. I basically made a fundamental schoolgirl error by choosing to make the nitrous oxide, big-bore, super-charged version when I should have started off with the understated yet reliable runner. You live and learn.

Callaloo

325g callaloo (drained weight)
1 small white onion, finely chopped
1 tablespoon thyme leaves
3 spring onions, white and green parts, chopped
125g thick bacon cubes
225g small prawns
150ml coconut milk
200g okra, sliced
1 small scotch bonnet chilli, de-seeded and chopped
Stock – about 1 litre (I used vegetable)

Begin by frying the okra in a little oil until soft but crispy on the outside. Set aside on kitchen paper to soak up any oil. In a large pan, soften the onions and chilli gently for a few minutes before adding the callaloo, bacon, thyme and stock. Bring to the boil and then simmer for about 30 minutes before adding the prawns, okra and coconut milk for a further 2 or 3 minutes. Check the seasoning and serve.