Jax Hamilton and Angel Bay’s Jamaican Patties Are the Real Deal

Celebrity chef Jax Hamilton and Angel Bay have teamed up to deliver a truly authentic taste of the Caribbean with their Jamaican Jerk BBQ Brisket Beef Patties. 

When you think about food, it really is an all-encompassing sensory experience. Some revel in the sound of a piece of meat sizzling on the grill. Others obsess over the almost artistic level of presentation found on social media (or in their copies of dish). And for the rest, the texture of the food itself is at times said to be akin to a spiritual experience. Often though, it’s the aromas that tend to capture our attention first: the smell of home cooking or fresh baking that sends all our senses into overdrive.

It’s not often that you hear of chance encounters occurring because of a smell, but that’s exactly what brought Jax and Angel Bay together. The rest, as they say, is history.

Jax, as she often does, was demonstrating at the Christchurch Food Show last year and had every intention of walking out the front door as soon as she was finished because, as she puts it, “when you get into the crowd, you can never leave.” But on this occasion, the aroma wafting from the Angel Bay stand was simply too powerful to resist – and she soon found herself helplessly lured in. “I smelled the most amazing aroma, and it was the Angel Bay, I think, the Angus patty. I stopped, and I had some of it, and I said, ‘Oh my God, these are amazing. I'd love to work with you’," explains Jax.

“I don't often do it, so it was just… the universe obviously wanting something to happen,” she adds.

The aroma may have been enough to bring Jax to the table, so to speak, but it was the flavours that really sealed the deal. “With an Angel Bay patty, you smell it first, which is the ultimate in food. Then you see it, and then you taste it, of course, and then you walk away with that memory,” says Jax. “I love that the meat is all New Zealand beef or lamb, and the patties are all made right here in Dunedin and have been for over 20 years. And then you can cook it your way in your home. But the flavour is incredible.”

Jax knew then and there that something special was brewing between her and Angel Bay, and immediately engaged with their marketing manager Becky Turnbull, who was at the stand. Several weeks later, Becky proposed a partnership between Jax and Angel Bay whereby she would create a new addition to the Angel Bay patty range. Jax didn’t need any convincing and knew that her authentic Jamaican background would provide a perfect addition to their already stellar line-up of products.

“To be able to introduce [Jamaican food] to people here, for me, is a real milestone in my career. It really is. I haven't done it with anything else, any other product, other than my own sauces. So that's a real milestone for me, to say, ‘Look what I've done. Look what I introduced here in New Zealand in 2022’," says Jax.

To say that Jax is a colourful character would be an understatement, but when she mentions the topic of Jamaican food, there’s a noticeable uptick in her enthusiasm. It becomes abundantly clear that her heritage is something she is fiercely proud of and forms an indelible part of her identity and her cooking. And just like Jax, Jamaican cuisine is a colourful endeavour.

“So, in the Jamaican culture, we season our meat, marinate our meat, almost everything. What we say is, ‘The more colours that food has, the more flavour it has.’ If you imagine you get a chicken, and it's white, and then you put it in the oven and it goes brown. But if you season it with lots of different flavours, it gets a lot darker. When you caramelise something, it's got lots of colour, it's got lots of flavour. So, it's about putting as much personality and flavour into your food, so you've got a lovely rhythm in your mouth when you're eating that lovely, amazing, succulent whatever it is,” explains Jax.

From Jax’s perspective, the connection between music and food is inseparable because, in her words, “food is the music in your mouth.” And if food is indeed music, then the Angel Bay Jamaican Jerk BBQ Brisket Beef patties might best be described as a soundtrack with a punchy kind of beat - owing in no small part to the jerk seasoning, which is a fundamental part of Jamaican cuisine. “Every single Jamaican household will have their own type of jerk sauce, or jerk season, in the cupboard,” says Jax.

“It really is an iconic ingredient for a Jamaican household. Everyone always has it, or everyone always uses it. If they don't have it in their house, they will buy jars of it. When you sit around on a Saturday, you'll have a jerk chicken, or you'll have jerk pork. And most people can just make it. It's in our DNA. You don't have to think about it, it just flows out of you.”

You’ll be hard-pressed to find genuine Jamaican food in New Zealand, but Jax says that these patties are a perfect introduction for Kiwis who have never had the pleasure of sitting down to an authentic meal. “They are the best introduction for the flavour profile, and for the happiness that they bring. You get everything. You close your eyes, mate, you're on Montego Bay. I swear to goodness. If you can't get there any other way,” she says with joy. “Yeah, they are. They're a perfect introduction.”

Because authentic Jamaican food is so scarce in this country, Jax felt a sense of duty to deliver a product that was not only flavoursome but true to her heritage. “For me, it had to have as much integrity as possible. To put these out for people to pay for them, it comes back to me, doesn't it? It couldn't be Annabel Langbein. It couldn't be Nadia Lim. It comes back to me, because actually, I am a Jamaican. That's my history.”

“I wanted not only… for people who've never tasted it before, to go, ‘Wow’, but I wanted Jamaican people to go, ‘This is it. She's done it. This is actually what it is,’ because you can go out there, and you can get replica facsimiles of Jamaican jerk, and it's not. It's not. There's too much sugar, or there's not enough salt,” says Jax. A simple blind taste test with her Jamaican friends confirmed she really had done it. In fact, the smell alone was enough to convince them: “They knew what it was from the beginning, even before they even tasted it. Now, that is on the money!”

After finding success with the recipe in her own kitchen, it was up to Angel Bay and their team of food technicians to replicate it for mass production, which Jax says was spot on, adding that there is very little difference between the patty she made in her own kitchen and the 50,000 or so that were produced in Angel Bay’s Dunedin factory. “When you take something that's raw, and you put it through that sort of process, it changes. Of course, it does. So, it was really interesting for me to be in that situation, to stand back, and watch the raw product become this patty. It was so interesting. And they're so clever with what they can do. And they've been doing it for years so successfully. So yeah, it was a very enjoyable process, and I hope to be able to do it again. That would be amazing,” she says.

Now that Angel Bay has successfully replicated her recipe, Jax is excited to share it with hungry Kiwis. “For me, it's about surprising the New Zealand burger-eating public, and the people that don't eat burgers, into having something that they've never really experienced before in a burger patty. Because even Jamaicans living in New Zealand potentially haven't had jerk in a patty."

She hasn’t had to look too far in delivering that surprise either, as demonstrated by the samples she handed out to crew members while filming a recent promotion for the patties. “I was just taking some around for some of the guys on set to taste, and one guy said, ‘Oh my God, this makes me feel like I'm alive.’ And that's what we want. We want someone to have something they've never had before, and to have a feeling they've never experienced before. And that's what our brands have done together. Magic.”

Just as the aroma of Angel Bay’s Angus patties caught her attention at the food show, Jax hopes that her recipe will achieve similar results among Kiwi households and help to bring people together for good food and, of course, music. What kind of music would Jax pair with these patties? She has a few recommendations: “Reggae would be good, of course, you know, a Jamaican patty. But I also like a bit of grime myself. I'm a London girl. A bit of Stormzy. I do like a bit of Little Simz. Something you can rock your hips to, and tap your foot to, and sing with your mates, chink some beers, and just be grateful to be alive,” she says.

Angel Bay Jamaican Jerk BBQ Beef Brisket Patties are available now for a limited time at all good supermarkets.

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