How Magnus McKellar Created a Jerk Chicken Empire in NYC — The Experts

Jamrock Jerk is literally 50% jerk, 50% food truck. Jerk chicken is built on the foundation of seasoning, depths of flavor, authenticity. If you cannot sustain those elements, then you cannot really deliver authentic jerk chicken. The truck is that source of attraction, and then once they get close enough, the aromas hit, the jerk hit, and then it's a done deal at that point. All right, guys, it's 9 a.m. We're gonna start prepping these seasonings. We use a combination of powders, also a liquid base that we use to build the base for the jerk chicken, the jerk pork. So what we're pouring out here now is nutmeg powder, and black pepper here, and garlic powder. This is Maggi seasoning. It's a favorite of Jamaicans. This is a big ingredient for us. Powdered seasonings are in place. We're gonna get some of this liquid base here now. I've always hated these buckets. They're a pain to open. Under no circumstances is there anything that surpasses the importance of the wet jerk marinade. Essentially, the jerk marinade here consists of fresh seasonings. So you have your scotch bonnet, the raw elements of scallions, green onions. There's also nutmeg in it as well, and then it also has brown sugar. That's a big deal. Molasses as well. One of these buckets will season about 150 pounds chicken daily, likewise for the pork. So we're going through a couple thousand pounds of chicken weekly. So on any given day, you're looking at eight to 10 buckets of seasoning. The idea of jerk, it originally came about from the indigenous people, the Tainos and the Arawaks, and subsequently the Maroons, which I'm also a part of that special group of people as well. They are runaway slaves, and during that time, they would smoke their meat over pimento wood, whatever they had available to them. Then that's how the concept of the jerk was coined. After all that paddling, this is the result here. I tend to just grab a quick taste just to make sure I mixed it properly. Good stuff. If we're gonna achieve perfect marination, we gotta have to prep the meat for that. I could, for example, take this chicken leg and just marinate it, but what about the undersides of the meat here? You're gonna have flavor all over here, but nothing here. What we've ensured that we do here at Jamrock is we peel back these skins. So when it gets seasoned, naturally the skin is gonna fall back, and guess what happens? We have seasonings marinating straight through to the bone. Critical step, we're not missing it here. On any given week, we're going through about 9,000 pounds of chicken. This is gonna be enough chicken for one of our food truck locations on a given day. What we're looking at here is our tumblers. These carry out that seasoning process for us in a quick way. Tumbling 150 pounds of meat, everything's gonna get perfectly marinated. This, I think, is perhaps one of the single greatest improvements that we've made. What this has done is replace the labor-intensive hand-seasoning process of 8,000 to 9,000 pounds of meat. We didn't know what we didn't have until we actually received these tumblers. All right, I think we hit that three-minute mark. There we go. Good stuff. Yeah, we spoke about peeling back the skin earlier. This is why, all right? We're gonna get it straight into the refrigerator, and then it's gonna sit for that 24 to 48 hours of marination. So we're just grabbing some pork here. You know, one of these cases weighs about 75 pounds. It's boneless pork shoulder. Beautiful meat. Good stuff here. Good stuff. Pork is actually where the origins of jerk actually started. You know, the slaves ran away to the mountains, you know, back in the 1600s. They weren't hunting chickens. They were hunting wild pigs, wild boars. It's my favorite and the favorite of many Jamaicans worldwide. So I think over the years, due to consumer demand, jerk chicken would have became more popular than pork. We're gonna execute seasoning here in much of the same manner that we did for the jerk chicken. So on Tuesdays, we're receiving our first delivery for the week. That gets seasoned and now sits and marinates for the next two days. And then on Thursday, we're pulling those tubs of marinated meat out and we're beginning that in-between secret process that we include in what we do here just to ensure that we're able to, you know, keep things at volume. So you're looking at three days later, whatever meat we prepped is finding its way in a cooler to be delivered by a supply van to a food truck and then on a grill out there in the streets. All right, so we're gonna hit the marinade for the oxtail now. We don't do jerk oxtails. That's not a thing. That's not Jamaican. But oxtails remains traditionally a dish that is stewed. We're gonna prepare a marinade that's suited for that specifically. And we use a ton more garlic for that to help to tenderize the oxtail meat. The soy sauce is a critical, critical element for the oxtail seasoning. We've gotten our liquid base in. We're gonna add a cup of black pepper again or Maggi seasoning again. We're gonna add about four cups of garlic powder. As you note here, one thing with all our dishes, there is a synonymous sense of uniformity as far as flavors are concerned in every single one of our dishes. The same bases that we're using for, you know, powdered bases that is, that we're using for the jerk, the same kind of powdered bases that we're using for the oxtails. So we got our oxtails here. We have them specially cut for us in inch and a half cuts. What we discovered was when the pieces are too small, when it goes through the stewing process, it ends up falling off the bone. That is a no-no for Jamaicans. Your oxtail must fall off the bone only when you're about to eat it, not before. We've had to find a way to make sure it stays on the bone up until consumption, and making the cuts larger has, you know, helped with that. We spoke about the thickness of the seasoning. You know, this is it right here, right? Thick, and it's gonna stick 100%. 12.02 at the moment. We're gonna let this tumble until 12.05. We're gonna get these inside the cooler, begin that marination process again. The culinary mastermind of every single thing that's amazing about Jamaica when it comes to food, my wife, and time. So this is stewed oxtails, and this has been marinating for two days. For the stewed oxtails, we use the same seasonings as the rice and peas, the onion, the scallions, the thyme, the ginger, and the hot pepper, and of course, the pimento. Interestingly, during the slavery era, the oxtail, it was basically a throwaway meat in that the slave owners would throw it away or it would be available to the slaves. But now, it's so expensive, it's a high-priced item and everything. We're going to cook it on high heat for 45 minutes, and after that time elapses, we'll turn it down to medium heat and have it cook for 90 minutes on low heat. All right, so now that our oxtails is almost complete, we're gonna add the last ingredient, which is butter beans. Gives it a nice, creamy texture. Interestingly, when we started this business, I wasn't confident enough that I'm able to turn around all this food. So we started with a chef, and the chef could only make two pounds of rice at a time. And from then, I said, that's not gonna work. And from that day, I've started cooking all the recipes here. This oxtail is now cooked and ready to be served. We don't want it to completely fall off the bone, just tender enough. When I get this grill prepped and ready to go, service is coming up in a couple of minutes, you know, within the hour or so. We use a combination of charcoal and also a specific kind of wood to give it a unique flavor. Each week, we're going through 120 bags of charcoal, 120 bags at 20 pounds. You're looking at 2,400 pounds of charcoal every week. We're, what, seven years in? Seven years going eight. We currently have nine trucks. In the dead of winter, you know, we go from operating six trucks this past season, 2024, to now operating just one truck, one unit outside of our commissary here in Tobago, Queens. So we're gonna get some of this chicken that, you know, we seasoned, marinated, and went through a secret process. Can't give it away. We're gonna get some jerk work on, though. Same process. Once we've started getting things moving over here, grills are firing, everything's looking good, we're gonna move things up to the top shelf, all right? A lot of fat, a lot of sizzle on that. And as you can see here, it's just doing its thing. We didn't think about a restaurant initially. Over the years, we've thought about it, but the unique idea of having the jerk and smoking it outside, that element is missing in the restaurant setting. So that's why we've always stick to food trucks instead. We can't say we're authentic if we're not able to deliver that element to the experience. Listen, this chicken is done, and it is beautiful. This is it right here. We see at this point, all that seasoning is embedded in this meat. What defines authentic? Is it sticking to the processes, or is it using specific ingredients? For us, it's a combination of both things. Jamaica, or roots, you know, the island, the spices that are produced on the island, those live in each and every aspect of the operation. I must clarify something as well, because we keep using the term food truck. We're not a food truck. We're a food cart. There is that open engagement that our food cart operation affords that you can never get in a truck. The Jamrock Jerk is 50% cart, 50% food. You can't have one without the other.