San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
A fresh spin on Jamaican patties
Puff pastry and curried chickpeas highlight new versions from Oakland
The Jamaican patty always makes me think about heat. Not just the heat of the beef filling flavored with Scotch bonnet peppers, though the sizzle it leaves on your tongue is significant among the handheld pastry’s many pleasures. I remember tucking a bagged patty or two into my pockets during the frigid New York City winters of my childhood, using them as much for their fingertipmelting warmth as for their ability to fill a belly. The bright yellow coloring of their crusts, tinged by turmeric (and sometimes egg yolk), recalled the sunny shores of their native Jamaica, a place that seemed very far from my gray city.
The Bay Area hasn’t historically had as many renditions. But this winter, I came across some that made me recall why I loved the dish so much: the nontraditional, but no less compelling, versions by two AfroCaribbean Oakland businesses, the Pleasure Principle and the Bussdown.
In its traditional form, the patty is made with a shortcruststyle pastry and filled with spiced beef, ackee or other savory ingredients; often, people make a meal of it by stuffing it into a piece of soft and buttery coco bread. Its halfcircle shape and forkcrimped edge — and even its utilitarian foundations — faintly suggest its cousin, the Cornish pasty, although its curry powder flavoring and cayenne component are Indian and West African in origin. Produced by enslaved and indentured laborers in the sugar plantations of British colonial Jamaica, the caloriepacked patties were made to sustain the body while out on the field, much like chipped beefand rutabagafilled pasties were meant to feed tin miners in Britain’s Cornwall as they worked underground.
That origin story is why Christina Wilson, chef of the Pleasure Principle, makes patties for her weekly AfroCaribbean popup menu, which includes empanadas and soul food like smothered chicken thighs. Wilson has long been invested in using food to explore the history of the African diaspora — “the food of my bloodline,” she told me. “Specifically, the food cultures that sprang up out of the mixing of cultures as a result of the transatlantic slave trade.” The ingenuity of Jamaican workers, who had to make the best of lives spent on foreign shores, made a huge impression on Wilson, whose take on the patty speaks to her devotion to the craft.
Her version of the beef patty ($7) is inspired by her first taste of the pastry, late one night during a visit to New York City. “It was explosively savory and super, super spicy,” she said. “I still remember that bite: It made my jowls water.” Accordingly, her patties don’t shy away from the heat. Their piquancy creeps up on you as you eat, wafting up your sinus until the corners of your eyes start to prickle. A base of ground grassfed beef and browned onions and garlic coax you into taking more and more bites until, somehow, you’ve made it through.
I love her puff pastry dough, which is a drastic departure from the typical shortcrust. It makes the pastry richer and exaggerates the flakiness of Jamaican patties, where brushing the crumbs off your shirt is part of the charm. Wilson gives the dough its characteristic yellow tint by brushing it with curry oil before baking. When you’re reheating the patties in your home oven, the heat unleashes the oil’s pungency and fills your kitchen with its cumindominant fragrance. A blended, Scotch bonnetpacked aged jerk sauce, served on the side for dipping, clings to the flaky pastry and makes it even spicier.
The Bussdown, a panAfrican virtual kitchen run by chefs Solomon Johnson and Mike Woods, combines the Jamaican patty with another famed Caribbean dish: the Trinidadian double, a handheld street food consisting of fried flatbread filled with curried chickpeas. Johnson and Woods ladle the saucy chickpeas over their patties ($6), finishing them with curls of green onion and elegant pickled baby carrots and radishes.
Their plated presentation is far away from the utilityfocused, proletarian patty meant to feed workers on the go, but the enhancements do serve a purpose. The curried chickpeas imbue each bite with incredible moisture and vegetal richness, and now it’s hard to imagine a patty without them. The patties’ dough, on the chewier end of the crust spectrum, easily stands up to the wet legume topping.
Among the Bussdown’s three patty options, the vegetarian one is the tastiest. Instead of beef, the pastry is filled with a mildly sweet and deceptively meaty plantain mash, with a soft texture that’s offset by the crunchy pickles. Rather than leaning into the fruit’s sweetness and taking the patty into a more expected dessert pie fashion, Johnson and Woods bring out the more savory flavor notes by mixing in a green garlic puree. The vegetarian patty is actually not very spicy at all, making it gentle on the stomach and palate.
While patties abound in Caribbean diasporic strongholds like London, New York City and Miami, they’ve been more of a rarity here until recent years. In the mid2010s, native San Franciscan Shani Jones launched Peaches Patties, an homage to her Jamaican mother and one of the city’s few Caribbean food businesses. And a popup called Tasty Tings, by Alyssa Magdaluyo, as well as a new Trinidadian restaurant in Oakland, Coco Breeze, entered the fray last year with their own takes on the patty.
Even if you’ve never had a Jamaican patty before, I think you’d still recognize them on first glimpse. It seems that many humans possess an innate craving for doughwrapped parcels, whether we’re talking about fried sesame balls, empanadas or piroshki. It’s likely why the patty was first carried out to the plantations of Jamaica, and why it has continued to proliferate, more than a century after it was born, to warm the pockets of people throughout the world.