Jamaica: Jamaican Patties
Recipe thanks to Rachel Ama on YouTube
It. Has. Been. A. Minute.
This project really stalled out at 25%. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing — that’s ~50 recipes I’ve never made before, which is great! But I also came out of the gate pretty hot and burnt myself out a little. Many of the recipes required specialty ingredients which are very difficult to find in my local town, and I also started a new job (and then another new job) and this slid all the way down — and then off — my to do list.
I also stopped writing longer form content for each recipe, favouring Instagram posts instead. You can find everything I made on my currently dormant Foodziemagoo account. For various reasons I’m off social media for 2025 (state of the world, amirite?), and the heavy push towards AI in all aspects of our lives has made me want to write words from my own brain again.
I guess when I say I’m off social media, I’m not counting YouTube, which is where I stumbled across this recipe in a moment of pure serendipity. I’d been thinking about kicking this project off again, but hadn’t done any research or even opened the spreadsheet to look at which countries I still had to go (spoiler: most of them!)
This creator immediately pulled me in with the promise of patties which could fool omnivores into believing they were made with meat. In fairness, I did not make that version — I have decided not to use mock meats in this project so that I wasn’t just making bunch of ground beef recipes from around the world and replacing the meat with Impossible. Which is no diss on Impossible — I love it and eat it all the time! But this project was meant to unearth different kinds of recipes which I wouldn’t normally stumble across.
My biggest hesitation about making this dish was making pastry. I truly, truly suck at making pastry. I’d blame too warm hands for melting the butter as I rub it through the flour, but I have terrible circulation. I just haven’t done it enough to have the experience to understand when I need to add a bit more water or let it rest a touch longer.
Thankfully, this pastry came together really easily — I loved the tip of grating and then freezing the butter to make the lamination process easier. I think it helped! What did not help was rolling out the pastry across the grain of lamination, like a fucking idiot. This meant that the pastry didn’t end up as flaky as it should have, but still kind of worked out? The load of fat in pastry does tend to be more forgiving.
The filling was really easy. I couldn’t find scotch bonnets in my local supermarket, so I used a habanero instead. I’m very glad I only added half, because it had a real kick.
The really cool element in this recipe was blitzing a slice of bread with some water and then adding it to the filling, and letting this simmer off for 10 minutes. It created a really thick gravy that held the filling together so that it didn’t release a bunch of water when it cooked in the pastry.
The filling was comprised of mushrooms, walnuts, and lentils with a load of spices and aromatics. It was dark and rich, thanks to the addition of dark soy and molasses.
I will not say that my assembly technique was all that great. Because I rolled out the pastry across the lamination lines, it split in some places (although this also meant that one of the patties looked like the mask from Scream, which was a delight), and I’m just not patient or detail oriented enough to make them super pretty.
Thankfully this didn’t matter, because they tasted incredible. The pastry was toothsome but also sturdy — you could make these and take them to a picnic and a bit of jostling along the way wouldn’t damage their structural integrity. The filling was rich and aromatic, and while I don’t think it would fool someone into thinking it was meat, I don’t think they’d miss it either. My partner asked that these get added to our regular roster, and while he’s normally very complimentary about my cooking, this is probably high highest praise as he doesn’t really care about food (at least in the way that I do).
The other brilliant element was the orange and fennel salad the creator recommended serving them with. Partnering a bright, fresh, and tangy salad with such a hearty meal made the promise of spring seem a little bit closer. It looked so inviting I was even brave enough to use my mandoline, something I rarely do because I like my fingers to be covered by all their skin.
Five out of five, you should make this. It’s delicious and warming and if you don’t want to eat them all you can assemble them and then freeze for later.