Grenada - home cooking

 

I was particularly enthused by our renewed committment to the "A to Z of London Restaurants" project, and was keen to tick the next country off the list as soon after the prior Greek restaurant visit as we could. A two and a half month gap is a definite improvement on two and a half years!

However that enthusiasm was fairly quickly dampened when the preparatory research began. For some reason I didn't expect to find a problem locating traditional Grenadian food in London. But I was wrong. After identifying a handful of traditional, fairly exclusively Grenadian dishes it was then a case of finding a restaurant or food stall serving such dishes. I could only come across one "defintiely" Grenadian restaurant, which unfortunately seemed to serve only pan-Caribbean dishes (patties, bakes, jerk chicken and curries). And of the other pan-Caribbean establishments in London, of which there are many, nowhere seemed to sell anything particularly Grenadian.

The bar I had set myself was oil down. The national dish of Grenada. If I couldn't find it served, I'd cook it myself. Easy? Not quite. The next hurdle was sourcing the key ingredients. One of which was new on me. Breadfruit. Given the fact it was the first time I'd even seen the word, I was fairly sure this wasn't something I could easily get my hands on.

In the end, it wasn't as tricky as first thought. I was assured I would "probably" find it at Caribbean market stalls in Brixton or Shepherd's Bush (areas with a sizeable Caribbean community). I also realised I could buy it tinned. Normally I would always go fresh. However, there was a great degree of "maybe" about sourcing a real breadfruit. Also, not an excuse, but I really didn't have the time to wander around markets looking for something I still wasn't really sure wasn't a myth in this country. 

Oh look! Six tins for £16 on Amazon. Buy now.

It was pretty clear when trying to find a good authentic recipe that, like many national dishes, there are many varations of oil down, which no doubt would differ from family to family, and neighbourhood to neighbourhood. I deliberately chose a recipe that brought together the mean average of ingredients of all the other recipes I came across.

There was however one key ingredient that I already decided I was going to miss. Pig tails. I had absolutely no intention of sourcing, cooking or eating anything close. If that immediately disqualifies this as anywhere near an authentic replication of the national dish then I'm absolutely fine with that.

So, to the kitchen. Green seasoning is another new one on me, but apparently very common and widespread in much of the cooking across the Caribbean. Rather than buy ready made, I decided to make my own. This was a mistake.

It was actually reasonably easy to put together. I combined in a bowl the following: 6 stalks of spring onion, 4 twigs of fresh thyme, 7 fat garlic cloves, 5 pimento peppers, a small handful of coriander leaves, 1 large onion, a handful of fresh parsley leaves, an inch cube of ginger, teaspoon of dried chilli flakes, and a tablespoon of vinegar. I then used a hand blender to blend everything together until it became a nice paste. Which it did quite nicely, leaving me a really nice bright red green seasoning. Very ungreen.

Even just looking at that again makes my heart sink. I bought red pimento peppers. Which completely dominated the colour of my "green" seasoning. I had no doubt it was still going to taste pretty epic. But I feared for the overall look of the final dish.

Anyway, onward. Rather than chicken on the bone, I used six boneless chicken thighs and covered the thighs in the red green seasoning, placing this in the fridge for now while I prepped all the rest of the ingredients.

After that I added one and a quarter tins of coconut milk to a bowl, added 2 teaspoons of ground turmeric, and blended this until the milk was an even colour throughout. Then coated chicken (plus all the remaining red green seasoning) was added to the bottom of a heavy cooking pot, along with 250g of the tinned breadfruit (cut into chunks), 1 unripe banana (sliced), 2 carrots (sliced), 250g pumpkin (chopped), 100g okra (sliced, from frozen), and some salt.

I then poured the turmeric coconut milk into the pot, and covered the contents of the pot with 70g of spinach. Lid on and cook over a medium heat for 25 minutes. The pot shouldn't be stirred while cooking.

When there's about 10 minutes left of the 25, its about time to make some dumplings. Really basic ingredients. 120g of flour. 240g water. A dash of salt. This is my nightmare. I cannot do anything which involves flour, baking, consistency... Even when I follow the instructions to the letter, it all goes terribly wrong. The very same happened here. So Elle had to step in to turn my mix of slop into about a dozen pinkie-finger-sized long dumplings. When the timer was up, I added these dumplings to the top of the pot contents.

The pot was then re-covered, and cooking resumed for another 45 minutes or so. Again, stirring should be avoided.

Forty five minutes later, the dish is ready to serve. I originally panicked about the amount of liquid still in the pot... I was expecting just a little left at the bottom. I tried to boil some off originally, but started to worry about overcooking the dish. So I served up the dish as it was, onto two plates, and provided a copious amount of bread to help with the sauce!

It turns out the bread was barely needed. The sauce thickened up really nicely on serving, and had a really rich, luxurious consistency to it which came as a surprise. Also, on presentation, I was quite relieved to see that the initial utter redness of the dish before cooking wasn't quite so prevalent now. In fact, comparing my final dish to other photos of oil down online, it didn't look too far off at all.

As for the food itself: This was a really wholesome, flavoursome dish. A kind of stew, which to me seemed more suited to a cold, winter night in the north of England than a hot, steamy Caribbean nation. But it was a lovely mix of meat and veg. The chicken was perfectly cooked and had taken in much of the flavour of the sauce. The breadfruit added a really nice consistency and "stodge" to the dish, as did the dumplings which ended up much firmer and more dense than I had expected. But this was no bad thing.

There was a really pleasant underpinning spiciness to the entire dish. Not too much at all, but definitely making itself known.

The spinach seemed a little lonely to me. The spinach did what spinach does. It largely disappeared. So its presence during eating was quite sparse, to the point I questioned whether I should have increased the amount I used. Maybe even doubled.

Overall despite the failure to find a restaurant, the stress over acuqiring breadfuit, the ballsing up of the green seasoning, and the horror show that was the dumpling slop, this didn't turn out to be the unmitigated disaster I thought it would be. It was a really tasty meal. One I want to try again, but either properly in a restaurant or food stall somewhere in this country. Or maybe we'll just have to visit Grenada and try it for real on home turf.