Jamaican White Water Rafting

Female 1: So you said you do events out here? Female 2: Yeah, this is a beautiful setting for it because we have a 300 year old Guanda tree here and the gorgeous back lawn so its beautiful. It rally is, so we private banquets and corporate events, anything. We have a focus on modern style of urban cuisine which is what I am going to showcase for you today. Female 1: So do you cook outside a lot for you outdoor events? Female 2: Yes, we do actually, we don’t normally have this setup for as we do today for you but this is Dalton, the head chef and he does a lot of cooking with me but today we’re going to show you a bit of contemporary Caribbean cuisine, Dalton would you put this on the fire for me? What we’re going to work with first is Aki, its our national fruit and its used traditionally in breakfast in Jamaica, it grows like this on a tree in a pod and to prepare it we basically we take it apart and you take out the black seed. And then this is our little bit of our red string inside that you have to pick out which is poisonous. Female 1: So where did you get your cooking talents? Female 2: Self thought chef, my sister and I started a business 14 years ago in 1994, we love Jamaican culture and Jamaican food and its really just about authentic experiences and authentic food for locals and visitors alike. So we have a pot of boiling water here, so will just dump the Aki in—okay so this is our fresh mahi-mahi fillets that we are going to—while were roasting our bread fruit over there which is a Jamaican thing. Its really typically eaten with fish, so we are going to do some steamed fish but we are going to do a new bell version, so we are going to squeeze some fresh lime on there for me and this is a little bit of citrus zest. Female 1: What have you put on the marinade here? Female 2: The marinade is lime, olive oil and a bit of ginger, thyme, squash pepper which is cut in here and we really are going to create like little packets of flavors and we scrap it all off served with a nice pot of butter. Female 1: That sounds good. Female 2: Yes, just scrape off the thyme leaves and wrap it on—if we had a Jamaican language like we have in traditional cooking. I would say it would be scallion, thyme, tomato, onions and squash peppers. Very simple and it’s the basis for almost all you know Jamaican food. Female 1: Aki has almost like a nut texture. Female 2: Yes, its very—it has a lot of fat and naturally, almost like an avocado when its cooked. Female 1: Is that indigenous to Jamaica or— Female 2: It was brought here supposedly by Captain Blight on the Bounty from Tahiti along with the red fruit. Their not very many countries in the world that actually have aki and you know I don’t anywhere else that cooks this as we do. Female 1: Good, great! Female 2: Then we are going to add the fresh aki pods now in Jamaica, this is kind of what aki would look like as a breakfast dish, except you would have the salted pod in there and then we would eat it with the bread fruit and various things. While we are doing that I am just going to give you a sprinkle of pepper. Female 1: That smells so good. Female 2: A little bit of salt, non-fattening dish to be added a little heavy cream. Because we use coconut so much in the Caribbean, we want a coconut flavor, so just put a teaspoon of coconut oil. Lets just give it a quick mix and the thing about pasta is that it’s very forgiving. Female 1: Look at that. Female 2: So if you want to sort of preseason, you know you need more—you want it to be more liquid you can add more heavy cream. I tend to like it a little liquid, I re-season it once with the pasta but this—it tends to make the flavor diminish a bit on the sauce. Female 1: This is really interesting you should see this. Female 2: This is the bread fruit and we roasted on an open flame over there and what we are going to do is peel it once it’s cooked, the inside is a texture of bread and then we serve it with a melted pimiento component butter. Put a little bit of salt and we are good to go, so that’s Jamaican steamed mahi-mahi with roasted bread fruit with a fresh butter and then we have aki pasta and over here a really quick dessert. This are Jamaican oranges that are mixed, actually my grandmother used to always do this, she used to peel them like this and stick the fork in them and keep them in the fridge, so its chilled fresh oranges and we just have that for dessert.