Jamaican Patties

Kingston's turmeric-yellow flaky pastry folded round spiced minced beef, baked until the crust shatters

Origin: Kingston & Jamaica

From the journey of Turmeric.

The Jamaican patty is recognisable before it is tasted, because of the colour. The pastry is stained deep yellow with turmeric, or with a mixture of turmeric and annatto, and it is a laminated suet or shortening pastry that bakes into flakes rather than the short crumb of a Cornish pasty, which is its distant ancestor. That ancestry is worth being accurate about. The form arrived with the British, whose Cornish miners and settlers brought the folded meat pasty; the filling is Jamaican, seasoned with scotch bonnet, thyme, allspice, and spring onion and bound with breadcrumbs into something closer to a wet, spiced mince than a chunky stew; and the turmeric is East Indian, brought by indentured labourers after emancipation. Three separate migrations are visible in one object, which is a fair summary of the Jamaican kitchen. Turmeric reached the Caribbean in the nineteenth century with Indian indenture, and across the Eastern Caribbean it is universally called saffron, which causes endless confusion with the actual crocus. It is used for colour more than for flavour in the patty, and the quantity is small; this is the atlas's standing point that influence is not quantity, since a teaspoon of turmeric does more to define this pastry than half a kilogram of flour does. The patty is Kingston street food and is eaten walking, often pushed into a coco bread, a soft folded coconut-milk roll, which produces a carbohydrate arrangement that Jamaicans see no need to justify. Tastee and Juici are the two national chains and the argument about which is better has been running for fifty years.

Ingredients

Pastry

  • 500 g plain flour
  • 2 tbsp ground turmeric
  • 1 tsp salt
  • 250 g cold butter or shortening, in cubes
  • 180 ml iced water
  • 1 tbsp white vinegar

Filling

  • 600 g minced beef
  • 1 onion, very finely chopped
  • 4 spring onions, finely chopped
  • 4 garlic cloves, crushed
  • 1 scotch bonnet, deseeded and finely chopped
  • 1 tbsp fresh thyme leaves
  • 2 tsp ground allspice
  • 1 tsp curry powder
  • 2 tsp salt
  • 1 tsp coarsely ground black pepper
  • 60 g fresh breadcrumbs
  • 300 ml beef stock
  • 2 tbsp oil

To finish

  • 1 egg beaten with 1 tbsp milk, to glaze

Method

  1. Make the filling first and cool it completely. Brown the mince hard in the oil, breaking it up.
  2. Add the onion, spring onions, garlic, scotch bonnet, thyme, allspice, curry powder, salt, and pepper and cook for five minutes.
  3. Add the stock and the breadcrumbs and simmer for fifteen minutes, until thick, wet, and glossy rather than dry.
  4. A Jamaican patty filling is deliberately moist. Cook it dry and the finished patty is dusty; the breadcrumbs hold the liquid so it does not soak the pastry.
  5. Cool it completely and refrigerate. Warm filling will melt the butter in the pastry and there will be no flakes.
  6. For the pastry, mix the flour, turmeric, and salt, then rub in half the butter until it looks like breadcrumbs.
  7. Cut the remaining butter through in flat pieces the size of a thumbnail, leaving them visible.
  8. Those visible flakes of butter are the lamination. Rub all the butter in evenly and you have shortcrust, which is a different and worse patty.
  9. Add the iced water and vinegar and bring the dough together quickly without kneading. Wrap and chill for an hour.
  10. Roll out to 3mm, cut 15cm rounds, and put a heaped spoonful of cold filling on one half of each.
  11. Fold over, press the edge firmly, and crimp it with a fork; the seam must be sealed or the filling boils out.
  12. Glaze, put on a lined tray, and bake at 200°C for thirty to thirty-five minutes until deep gold and puffed. Cool for ten minutes before eating, since the filling holds its heat alarmingly.

Notes

Turmeric in the pastry is what makes it a Jamaican patty. Leave visible pieces of butter for flakiness and keep everything cold. Cool the filling completely and keep it moist. Seal the seam properly. They freeze well raw and go into the oven from frozen with ten minutes added. Pushed into a split coco bread they become the standard Kingston lunch, and no Jamaican regards that as excessive.

The Gastrographer

The Gastrographer

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