Press: October 8, 1997
Follow your Bliss:
Pluto Brings a taste of the Caribbean to Carrboro
By Linda Burnham
Independent Weekly, Oct. 8-14, 1997
Before Columbus, the now-extinct Arawak Indians in Jamaica were using jerk spices to flavor and cure their meat. That’s according to Pluto, native Jamaican, local musician and inventor extraordinaire of a jerk seasoning called Caribbean Bliss.
Pluto makes this pronouncement while demonstrating the uses of “the Bliss” at a table in A Southern Season, a market in Chapel Hill that is truly a bit of gourmet heaven. Sometimes I go in there just to wander among the shelves bearing exotic coffees, dark-dark chocolate and luxury cookware, the deli case with its wilderness of cheeses, the hotter ‘n hell hot-sauce aisle and the display of delicacies made here in North Carolina.
That’s where Pluto is set up, between the Bone-Suckin’ Sauce and the Carolina in the Morning Pancake Mix, beaming from behind a table holding trays of jerk turkey and jerk chicken (“hot” and “mild”). With a dazzling smile and a Herculean handshake I’ll never forget, he strongly urges me to taste his wares. Sure, it’s hyperbole to say Pluto’s jerk turkey changed my life, but I can truly say it jerked me in another culinary direction. Tender doesn’t even begin to get to the melt-in-your-mouth texture of this stuff, and the flavor just can’t be described in English.
“The jerk spices have a natural tenderizer,” Pluto says, laughing at the size of my wide-open eyes. “The Bliss is a dry rub. You marinate the turkey in it overnight, and it becomes so tender that you don’t have to cook it long. Just a little bit of water in the roasting pan and you can cook a 25-pound turkey in only three hours.” He holds the small bottle of sweet, peppery, earthy, red-orange spice under my nose, and I try to guess the secret ingredient that makes this seasoning so different from the others I use, but no luck. It remains a secret.
“I grew up in Jamaica with herbs and spices,” says Pluto over his shoulder, passing out recipes to the anxious meat lovers who are shoving me out of the way to get to the samples. “When I was sick, my grandmother went out in the woods and knew exactly what to look for to fix me right up.”
He beckons to a passing customer, who looks warily into the “hot” jerk chicken pan, asking, “Is it Smoky Joe?” (Meaning, says Pluto, will it burn her tongue? It doesn’t.) An African-American woman takes her time tasting from all three trays and murmuring “Very familiar, very familiar.”
A couple approaches the display with gusto, digging into the turkey and feeding the juicy morsels to each other on little plastic forks. “Oh, my God,” says the woman, “it’s really good! It’s really good!”
“It’s better than good,” says Pluto, with just a trace of an accent. “It’s healthy. It’s fat-free. There’s no MSG, no preservatives or additives. You can cook without adding butter or oil, which doesn’t do the bird justice anyway.”
Bottles of Bliss are stacked on the counter, bearing Pluto’s beaming countenance surrounded by his bountiful dreadlocks. Pluto sells 100 bottles every time he does a demo at A Southern Season, which is now distributing Caribbean Bliss under the market’s wholesale mane, Carolina Cupboard.
“We love it when Pluto comes,” says Paul Saltzman, the grocery store manager, as he sidles up to watch the crowds around the table. Half of them are wearing the store’s uniform. “It’s a big staff favorite.”
“Yeah,” says a young sales clerk, grinning with her mouth full, “you can tell where the discriminating people are today.”
Only two years old, the Caribbean Bliss business is growing like crazy. Weaver Street Market puts Bliss on its rotisserie chickens. Fowler’s Gourmet uses it to make their trademark blended chicken and pork sausage. Desperate customers call Pluto from all over the country begging for replenishment of Bliss, originally sent to them for Christmas by Tar Heel relatives.
Pluto’s friend and partner, attorney Rob Monath, convinced him to start the business. Pluto invited Monath, who also lives in Carrboro, over for Christmas dinner not long after Pluto had perfected the jerk concoction. “And I was dreading it,” Monath tells me on the patio at Weaver Street Market a few days after the demo. “I’d had jerk before and it was just awful. I’m an honest person, and the truth was gonna be all over my face. But, to my utter delight, I had never tasted anything so wonderful in my life. I said ‘You gotta market this.’”
“Jerk,” Pluto tells me, “creates a natural chemistry between the meats and herbs and spices. The pirates who sailed in Caribbean waters were able to take jerk-cured meats with them onboard ship. You find the right combination and it works wonderfully.” It took Pluto himself about two years of sporadic testing to find the right combo, the one he remembered from childhood, but couldn’t find locally.
Right now Pluto is “makin’ the Bliss” in his own kitchen in Carrboro–easy to do because the ingredients are dry and the bottles small. But he has big plans. Pluto already has backers for a Jamaican restaurant in the Triangle, but he and Monath are taking their time. For one thing, apparently Pluto wasn’t born to make jerk seasoning.
“I’m chosen to be a musician,” he beams. Every two weeks or so, Pluto puts away the spices to get on stage with his five-piece band, Plutopia, which was voted best reggae band in The Independent’s readers’ poll last year. Not strictly Jamaican, Plutopia’s sound has been called “a cross between Bob Marley and the Grateful Dead.” The band has shared stages with musicians ranging from De La Soul and Jimmy Cliff to Hootie and the Blowfish and Jimmy Buffett.
“Men, women, black, white,” Pluto describes the band. “It was designed to break down racial and gender barriers, just by our appearance. Plutopia is set up to be diverse and attract different ethnic groups, and it does.”
The band also works in the schools, giving concerts and talking to kids about racial harmony and preservation of the planet. “We worked with 2,500 kids in 10 days in South Carolina,” Pluto says. “The kids wrote back and we put their stuff on our latest CD cover. Everybody loved it.”
Leaving the Plutopians on the patio in the sun, I went right out and bought a turkey breast, rubbed it with Caribbean Bliss, and the next day my house smelled like Thanksgiving in Jamaica. The meat was so fragrant, one of my dogs broke all precedent and stole it right off the kitchen counter when I wasn’t looking. Buster’s in the dog house now. But he’s smiling.
