I saw this recipe for gluten-free jamaican patties on pinterest, and after reading through decided that all the ingredients sounded good enough to me.  I became obsessed with making them. I thought about them constantly for two days until I went and picked up a scotch bonnet pepper and cream cheese so that I could make them.

I won’t write out all the ingredients and recipe, because you can find them on I Breathe… I’m hungry… and I actually did follow the recipe, but with one pretty significant change. That dough was a b@#h! I could not roll it out without it crumbling apart! It was pretty disastrous, actually. I was about to throw it out and just eat the yummy filling when I thought about cramming them into muffin tins to make Jamaican-patty inspired muffin tart things. Ahhh, success.

They aren’t incredibly pretty, but they sure did taste good. Here’s how the process looked.

Spices!

Scotch Bonnet Pepper. Yes, I am wearing rubber gloves, and you should too. If you don’t have them, go out and buy them before you dare cut into that pepper. A Scotch Bonnet is HOT. To quote my good friend Wikipedia, “Most Scotch Bonnets have a heat rating of 100,000–350,000 Scoville Units. For comparison, most jalapeño peppers have a heat rating of 2,500 to 8,000 on the Scoville scale.” If you get that heat in your hands or eyes it will hurt. Ask my mom about the time I cut a habanero pepper without gloves and then touched my face. She walked into me smearing sour cream all over my face to try to neutralize the burn. True story.

Pureeing the onion, pepper and garlic with some water

Adding the mixture to the meat

Spices added!

Making that “dough”. Ugh.

My improvisation

Ready for the oven. You aren’t cooking anything here, so really it’s just to heat it up and make the dough crispy.

I don’t think I will ever make these again, but if anyone does and gets them to look like an actual Jamaican patty, do let me know. The filling was delicious, however. It might be really delicious inside a curry flavoured Pure wrap .

Update: These froze pretty well. They were a bit crumbly, and I ate them with a fork, but no softer/crumbly than they were the first time around. I froze them in packages of two, took it out of the freezer the night before and thawed in my lunch bag overnight, microwaved one minute.