Hairy Bikers Jerk Pork Chops

Hairy Bikers jerk pork chops need almost no cooking, because the marinade does everything and the grill just finishes it. That recipe is in British Classics, where it serves four at roughly 475 calories over 2 hours 28 minutes.

Si and Dave say in British Classics that “the marinade does all the work”, which is why the method is so short. Thirteen things go into the blender for it, though the scotch bonnets are what people remember.

The chop matters just as much though, since the recipe asks for large ones that are fatty and on the bone. Fat and bone both slow the cooking down, so the outside can char under a hot grill while the middle stays juicy.

Hairy Bikers Jerk Pork Chops Recipe

Author: Alex Saidani Cooking Method:Grilling Cuisine:British Caribbean Courses:Dinner

Difficulty:BeginnerPrep time:2 hours 15 minutesCook time: 8 minutesRest time: 5 minutesTotal time:2 hours 28 minutesServings:4 servingsCalories:475 kcal Best Season:Summer

Description

Spring onions, garlic, ginger, thyme and warm spices are blitzed with vinegar, oil and dark brown sugar until loose enough to pour. The chops sit in it overnight, then go under a medium-high grill for a few minutes a side. Rest them before serving.

Ingredients

For the Pork:

• 4 large pork chops, preferably fatty and on the bone
• 1 tsp salt

For the Jerk Marinade:

• Bunch of spring onions, roughly chopped
• 1-2 scotch bonnet chillies, seeded, depending on how hot you want it
• 6 garlic cloves
• 30g fresh root ginger, chopped
• Leaves from a large thyme sprig
• 2 tbsp red wine vinegar
• 2 tbsp vegetable oil
• 2 tbsp soft dark brown sugar
• 1 tbsp allspice berries, crushed
• 1 tsp cinnamon
• 1 tsp smoked paprika
• Good grating of nutmeg
• 1 tsp black pepper

Instructions

1. Blitz the marinade: Put all the marinade ingredients into a food processor or blender and blitz until you have a fairly liquid paste.
2. Marinate the chops: Put the pork chops in a bowl, season them with the teaspoon of salt, then pour the marinade over. Cover and leave for at least a couple of hours, or overnight if you can.
3. Grill them: Heat your grill to medium-high or get the barbecue going, then grill the chops for 3 to 4 minutes on each side, depending on thickness.
4. Rest and serve: Leave the chops to rest for a few minutes before you serve them.

FAQs

One scotch bonnet or two?

Start with one. The recipe gives you the choice and Si and Dave flag the seasoning as quite hot, so a single bonnet in a marinade for four chops already carries a decent kick. Two makes it genuinely fierce.

Seed them either way, as the recipe says. The heat is not really in the seeds themselves, it sits in the pale pith they are attached to, so scraping out both together is what brings the temperature down. Wash your hands properly afterwards. If you bought a pack and only used one, the vegetarian chilli takes a whole scotch bonnet in place of its three jalapenos, so the rest need not go to waste.

Two hours or overnight, how much difference does it make?

Enough that it is worth planning around. Two hours coats and seasons the outside, which is most of what a jerk marinade is there to do. Overnight lets the salt and the spice work further in, so you get flavour through the chop rather than just on it.

The recipe is clear about which it prefers and does not put an upper limit on it. If you are cooking on a Sunday, mix the marinade on Saturday night and it takes ten minutes out of your day rather than adding two hours to it.

Is 3 to 4 minutes a side really enough?

For an average chop, yes. For the large, thick, bone-in ones the recipe actually asks for, watch it, which is why the book writes “depending on thickness” instead of committing to one number.

The bone is what slows things down, since heat has to travel around it rather than through. If yours are properly thick, sear them fast for colour and then move them to a cooler part of the barbecue or drop the grill down to finish. Colour first and gentle heat after is the same order the pork chop rosti works in, frying two minutes a side then going into the oven for fifteen.

The marinade works on other meat, so what else?

Chicken is the obvious one and the recipe says so directly. Thighs and drumsticks take it better than breast, because jerk is aggressive and lean white meat disappears under it.

For the same idea done with chicken start to finish, the piri piri chicken blitzes its marinade the same way and gives you a barbecue method and an oven one, which is useful in a British summer. It is built on four mild red chillies and two bird’s eyes rather than scotch bonnets, so it lands differently even though the technique is identical.

Do I scrape the marinade off before grilling?

No, leave it on. Those two tablespoons of dark brown sugar are what give you the dark, blistered crust that makes a jerk chop look right, and scraping it off throws that away.

It does mean watching the heat, since sugar catches fast. Medium-high rather than flat out. It is worth comparing with the chicken shawarma, which specifically tells you to scrape the excess off before it goes on, because that marinade is lemon, oil and spices with no sugar in it at all, so the bits just burn without giving anything back.