Easy Jamaican Jerk Chicken Tacos
We’ve made many delicious meals from tasty ingredients folded into fresh Homemade Corn Tortillas, including these easy jerk chicken tacos. You’ll make a cheater jerk sauce aioli using store-bought mayo, and layer on as much diced vegetable and pineapple as your tortillas can hold. We recommend serving with Cilantro-Lime Rice and Classic Potato Salad. For another easy taco recipe, try our Chicken Street Tacos!
What Is Jerk Chicken?
We go into more detail about the history of the “jerk” way of cooking in our Homemade Jamaican Jerk Seasoning recipe, but a real, authentic Jamaican jerk chicken recipe would involve cooking chicken over an open fire built out of the wood of a native Jamaican tree called a pimento tree. We’d love to try that sometime—especially since, to make it really authentic we’d obviously need to do it in Jamaica.
But, for this recipe, easy jerk chicken is what we’re after—particularly since we’re going to slice it up and load it into cabbage-filled, pineapple-topped, jerk sauce aioli-drizzled (more on that later) jerk chicken tacos. So here, within the context of this recipe, ‘jerk chicken’ refers to chicken thighs that are spiced with a homemade jerk spice blend.
Ingredients You’ll Need To Make Jerk Chicken Tacos
Jerk sauce aioli: as non-traditional as it gets, and really tasty. Just good old mayo, mixed with more lime juice and house made jerk spice blend and then drizzled all over your jerk chicken tacos.
Diced vegetables: raw red onions, green cabbage and bright cilantro lend their much-needed brightness and texture, slicing through the smoky jerk chicken and creamy aioli with a welcome, vegetal sharpness.
Pineapple: because sweet + heat are hard to beat! Check out our Pineapple Pork Stir-Fry with Peppers for more of this winning combo.
How To Make Jerk Chicken:
Our jerk chicken recipe relies on a dry jerk seasoning blend—homemade jerk is our preference, but if you have a store-bought jerk spice blend that you love, that works too. Here’s how to make jerk chicken thighs on the grill, or in the oven:
Make a jerk seasoned slurry of jerk seasoning, fresh-squeezed lime juice and olive oil.
Toss your boneless, skinless chicken thighs with the jerk sauce and let it sit for a few minutes while you get the grill going.
Grill the jerk chicken thighs! Cook over a medium heat, and flip the jerk chicken thighs when they’re about half-cooked. When an instant-read thermometer inserted into the thickest part of the boneless, skinless chicken thigh says 165°F, pull that jerk chicken off the grill—it’s done!
Or bake: If you’re doing it in the oven, you’ll need to lay the jerk-seasoned boneless chicken thighs on a baking sheet and bake for about 20 minutes, or until you get that same 165°F internal temperature reading.
Eat! You could serve these jerk chicken thighs as-is, with a Simple Salad or as part of a bigger BBQ spread. But, as you know, we prefer to turn the grilled chicken into jerk chicken tacos. Just line up all of the jerk chicken taco toppings and let your guests make their own tacos.
How to Store Jerk Chicken + Tips
Chicken, our best frozen friend. Great to have on hand (uncooked and cooked) in the freezer, this grilled jerk chicken is a great flavorful addition. Store the cooked thighs whole or sliced and freeze for future meals.
Making tortillas from scratch makes a huge difference to homemade tacos. We recommend getting a tortilla press and making our Corn Tortillas next time you have taco night.
Homemade spice blends make a really nice gift! We like to use these glass jars to make jerk seasoning extra cute for gifting.
The Modern Proper Loves Tacos
Vegan tacos, fish tacos and everything in between—there is room for every taco in our hearts.
Taco Time!
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