The Afro-Caribbean Condiment Kwame Onwuachi Suggests For Beginners

Celebrity chef Kwame Onwuachi is known for his Afro-Caribbean cuisine through his restaurants Tatiana, in New York City, and the recently opened Dogon, in Washington D.C. He's celebrated for his fine dining skills, but he's also a cookbook author, having previously written "My America: Recipes from a Young Black Chef." If we can't all make it out to his East Coast restaurants to try his food, our next best bet is making some of it at home for ourselves.

I recently had a chance to speak to him in person in an exclusive interview, and so I asked him about the one thing we should try creating at home if we want to try creating our own intro to his style of cooking. "I would try doing jerk barbecue [sauce]," Onwuachi told me. "I think it's a sauce that goes with a lot of things, and you have that familiarity with barbecue with maybe that new thing that you may not have tasted, which is you know, the spices and jerk." The jerk barbecue sauce he's referring to is his own recipe, which you can get from his book or online (it's published on Food Network's site). I had a chance to try it in person, and I have to say — it's great.

The barbecue sauce is a sweet ketchup-based sauce, bolstered with the flavors of onion, garlic, ginger, brown sugar, and jerk paste. The tomato base makes it taste familiar to an American palate, while the complex spices and aromatics position it way beyond just a store-bought barbecue sauce. 

Depending on how spicy your jerk paste is, this jerk barbecue sauce can get pretty warm. If you don't have the time to make the jerk paste mentioned in the ingredients list from scratch, you can also use premade paste; Onwuachi suggests Walkerswood brand. Out of all the possible things I could have sampled it with, I tried it with Chicken McNuggets (we were at a McDonald's sponsored event), and it was a good pairing. I can only imagine what it'd be like with his jerk chicken recipe, which was another thing he suggested first-timers pair it with.

Otherwise, it'd make a great lacquer for some skewers, pork, or wherever you'd generally use barbecue sauce. And to me, sauces make an excellent entry to any type of cooking, since you can start easy with them on familiar ingredients, then delve deeper into that cuisine as you go along. Onwuachi's jerk barbecue sauce is an easy foray into Afro-Caribbean cooking requiring only beginner-level effort, and things can only get more flavorful from here on out.