This week is all about Caribbean food, something I have a deep love for. My dad was from Nassau, and I grew up cooking and eating Bahamian recipes. As I grew older, I’ve found Caribbean food, in general, is always delicious. Seriously, I’ve never tried a dish I didn’t like! So after searching through my Pinterest boards, I found my first dish: Caribbean Chicken. From the comments on the original post, this is a Western Caribbean dish called stew chicken and most famously from Trinidad, although a few other islands were mentioned.
This is another one of my favorite chicken recipes, Caribbean Chicken. It is super tasty and always a hit with everyone.
The Ingredients
The shopping list for this recipe is a little long, but don’t let that scare you away. Most of the ingredients are for the marinade and, of course, the chicken you use it on. Speaking of chicken, you’re going to need a lot. this recipe gave me the option of using a whole chicken cut into pieces or 3 pounds of chicken breasts cut into large chunks. I opted for a mix of chicken breasts, thighs (both boneless), and drumsticks, as you can see, and also went with skinless since the recipe didn’t specify. I figured it would allow the marinade to soak in more easily.
The Process
First off is marinating the chicken and vegetables. You’re going to need a big bowl. You know the one you have all your other mixing bowls sitting in that’s so big it won’t fit into the dishwasher and you barely ever use it? That’s the one you’ll need. Mine is 24 cups, and it was just big enough to hold everything, although I did have some veggies ‘escape’ the bowl when I mixed everything.
Once everything was marinated, I got out the biggest Dutch oven I have–it’s just over 7 quarts and made of enameled cast iron (and weighs a TON). I found it had more than enough room for this recipe, so a slightly smaller pot would probably work too.
The first cooking step was getting the chicken pieces browned in a mixture of olive oil and brown sugar. I use an electric stove and kept the dial around 5 for this step. It kept the sugar from burning and still gave the chicken a decent browning at 1-2 minutes per side and in 4 batches.
Now that the ‘hard’ parts were done, all I had to do was throw everything back into the pot, add a cup of water and the ketchup, and let my Caribbean chicken stew for an hour. I followed the author’s suggestion and removed the lid around 45 minutes and increased the heat to give me a thicker gravy. I can’t say I ended up with a thick gravy, so you might want to add less water or remove the lid earlier.
Finally, here’s how the time broke down for all the steps:
- 12 minutes to make the marinade (step 1)
- 1 hour to marinate
- 20 minutes to brown the chicken and add everything to the pot (steps 2-3)
- 1 hour to cook
- 2 hours 35 minutes total
