BELIZE: Belizean Way Of Cooking

Belizean cuisine is an amalgamation of all ethnicities in the nation of Belize and their respectively wide variety of foods.

With the addition of immigrants from India, mainland China, Nigeria and neighbouring Central American countries over the years, Belizean cuisine also now has an added international flavour.

Particularly with the gastronomic rise in tourism in the past five years, European cuisine, as well as American favourites, has become as readily available as the stalwart Kriol (Creole) rice-and-beans, Latino chimole, Mayan caldo, Garifuna hudut or East Indian curried favourites.

All dishes which, incidentally, can today be considered pan-Belizean.

Belize Rice and Beans, with its several accompaniments, can be found on most restaurants’ menus. A variation is rice-and-peas made with black-eyed peas instead of with red kidney beans.

A sister dish, but definitely different, is beans-and-rice, which is the stewed beans served with white rice but not cooked together like its sister dish and also served with either potato salad or cole slaw, plantain, and your choice of meat or fish.

One of its distinctive ingredients, coconut milk, is also a main ingredient in several other Belizean dishes. One of these is sere, which is a delectable dish, usually made with fish, swimming in a seasoned coconut milk sauce laced with okra and ground foods like cassava and cocoa.

The sere is eaten with grated green plantain or often with white rice.

While it is hard to pin down any truly distinctive Belizean cuisine, what you will find in Belize is a mix of Caribbean, Mexican, African, Spanish, and Mayan culinary influences. You'll also find burgers, pizzas, Chinese food, and even Indian restaurants.

Belize's strongest suit is its seafood. Fresh fish, lobster, shrimp, and conch are widely available, especially in the beach and island destinations. Belize has historically been a major exporter of lobster, but overharvesting has caused the population to decline.

It is still readily available and relatively inexpensive, but there is a lobster season, from June 15 to February 14.

Rice and beans is a major staple, often served as an accompaniment to almost any main dish. A slight difference is to be inferred between rice and beans, which are usually cooked sometimes in coconut milk and served together, and beans and rice, which are usually cooked and served separately.

Belizeans tend to use a small red bean, but black beans are sometimes used.

Aside from rice and beans, if there were such a thing as a national dish it would be stew chicken and its close cousins stew beef and stew fish.
These Kriol-based recipes are dark stews that get their color from a broad mix of spices, as well as red recado, which is made from annatto seed or achiote. A similar and related stew commonly found around Belize is chimole, which is sometimes called black gumbo.


Breakfast often consists of sides of bread, flour tortillas, or fry jacks that are often homemade and eaten with various cheeses. All are often accompanied with refried beans, cheeses, and various forms of eggs, etc. Inclusive is also cereal along with milk, coffee, or tea.

Midday meals vary, from lighter foods such as rice and beans, tamales, panades or fried meat pies, escabeche or onion soup, chimole/chirmole or soup, stew chicken, garnaches or fried tortillas with beans, cheese, and diced onion sauce or diced cabbage to various constituted dinners featuring some type of rice and beans, meat and salad or coleslaw.

In the rural areas meals may be more simplified than in the cities. The Maya use recado, corn or maize for most of their meals, and the Garifuna are fond of seafood, cassava particularly made into cassava bread or Ereba and vegetables.

Belize abounds with restaurants and fast food establishments selling fairly cheaply. Local fruits are quite common, raw vegetables from the markets less so. Mealtime is a communion for families and schools and some businesses close at midday for lunch, reopening later in the afternoon.

Regular deli items originally from the Mestizo culture that are now considered pan-Belizean include garnaches, fried corn tortilla smeared with beans and shredded cheese, tamales made from corn and chicken or its sister and panades which can be thought of as a fried corn patty with beans or seasoned shredded fish inside and topped with pickled onions.

The most famous Maya dish is called Caldo. Tortillas, cooked on a comal and used to wrap other foods such as meat, beans, etc., were common and are perhaps the most well-known pre-Columbian Mesoamerican food.

Tamales consist of corn dough, often containing a filling, that are wrapped in a corn husk and steam cooked. Both atole and pozole were liquid based gruel-like dishes that were made by mixing ground maize or hominy with water, but being the first much more dense used as a drinking source and the second one with complete big grains of maize incorporated into a chicken broth.

Though these dishes could be consumed plain, other ingredients were added to diversify flavor, including, for example, honey, chiles, meat, seafood, cacao, wild onions, and salt.

Several different varieties of beans were grown, including pinto, red, and black beans. Other cultivated crops, including fruits, contributed to the overall diet of the ancient Maya, including tomato, chile peppers, avocado, breadnut, guava, guanabana, papaya, pineapple, pumpkin, and sweet potato.

Various herbs were grown and used, including vanilla, epazote, achiote (and the annatto seed), white cinnamon, hoja santa, avocado leaf, and garlic vine.

Kriols in general eat a relatively balanced diet. The bile up or boil up is considered the cultural dish of the Belizean Kriols. It is combination boiled eggs, fish or pig tail, with a number of ground foods such as Cassava, Green Plantains, Yams, Sweet Potatoes, cocoa, and Tomato Sauce.

In Belize, cassava is traditionally made into bammy, a small fried cassava cake inherited from the Garifuna.

The cassava root is grated, rinsed well, dried, salted, and pressed to form flat cakes about 4 inches in diameter and 1/2-inch thick. The cakes are lightly fried, then dipped in coconut milk and fried again.

Bammies are usually served as a starchy side dish with breakfast, with fish dishes or alone as a snack. Cassava Pone is a traditional Belizean Kriol and pan-West Indian dessert recipe for a classic cassava flour cake sometimes made with coconuts and raisins.

The Kriol fish sere is similar to a dish from the Garifuna culture, called hudut. There are two main types of hudut, one made with coconut milk, similar to the sere described above, but made with mashed half-ripe plantain.

The other type does not use coconut milk and may best be compared to a spicy fish soup. Bos a pepa, a Belizean pepper sauce made from the hot habanero or the milder jalapeno, is sometimes added.

Every single part of the coconut has some use: the dried husk for ornamental arts and for getting the fire going in a bar-b-cue; the water as a refreshing beverage or as a mixer with alcoholic drinks; the meat grated for its milk for uses as described above, or in other preparations, like the distinctive coconut-flavored taste of Kriol bread and bun.

Dukunu is a dish made with sweetened starch usually cornmeal but can also be sweet corn wrapped and boiled in aluminum foil or a banana leaf. Cahn Sham is ground or powdered sweetened parched corn.

The dried grated coconut meat, after you mix with water and squeeze out its milk, provides the basis for many Belizean desserts.

Like coconut pie and tarts, coconut crust the grated coconut is sweetened with sugar and baked in a flour crust folded over like a patty, tablata, which is the grated coconut meat mixed with thin ginger slices, sugar and water, baked and cut into squares.

There is also the version called cut-o-brute, which is made of chunks of coconut instead of the grated pieces; and then there is trifle, made with half green grated coconut, milk, flour, sugar, eggs, lemon essence, margarine and baking powder similar to coconut cake; coconut fudge; and coconut ice cream.

As noted above, fry jacks or Johnny cakes accompanied by fried beans with sausage or eggs make a common Belizean breakfast. Both the jacks and Johnny cakes are made from flour, but while the jacks are flattened and fried, the Johnny cakes are round fluffy savory biscuits, often topped by butter or a slice of cheese.

Among the main staples of a Kriol dinner are rice and beans with some type of meat and salad, whether potato, vegetable, or coleslaw, seafoods including fish, conch, lobster, some game meats including iguana, deer, peccary and gibnut; and ground foods such as cassava, potatoes, cocoa and plantains.

Fresh juice or water are typically served, occasionally replaced by soft drinks and alcoholic beverages homemade wines made from berries, cashew, sorosi, grapefruit and rice are especially common.

Typical desserts include sweets such as wangla and powderbun, cakes and pies, and potato pudding pound. Usually to be seen on a breakfast table are specially made bread and bun, johnny-cakes and fry-cakes also called fry jacks. In recent years Kriols have adopted foods from other groups as they have adopted theirs.

There is a wide variety of Garifuna dishes, including the more commonly known ereba cassava bread made from grated cassava or manioc. This is done in an ancient and time-consuming process involving a long, snake-like woven basket or ruguma which strains the cassava of its juice.

It is then dried overnight and later sieved through flat rounded baskets or hibise to form flour that is baked into pancakes on a large iron griddle.

Ereba is fondly eaten with fish, hudutu or pounded plantains or alone with gravy or lasusu. Others include: Bundiga a plantain lasusu, Mazapan, and Bimacacule sticky sweet rice.

There is a difference in the flavors of meats, such as turkey and chicken, from other countries because of differences in the diet of the animals being fed on local foodstuffs as opposed to imported grains.

Belizean chickens in particular some allege compared to other chickens have an unusually rich flavor. Belizeans eat much more chicken and fish, than beef or pork.

The following are popular ingredients used in Belizean Cooking:

- Cassava

- Cohune

- Plantain

- Banana

- Habanero

- Chayote which is locally called chocho

-Ginger

- Callaloo

- Escallion

- Mangos

- Breadfruit

- Yam

- Garlic

- Black pepper

- Dried and salted cod also locally called salt fish

- Salted beef

- Thyme

- Cow feet

- Pig tail

- Coconut milk

- Coconut

- Guava

- Soursop

- Passion fruit

- Sugar cane

- Ketchup

- Onion

- Brown sauce

- Mamey sapote locally known as mahmee

- Calabash

- Avocado also locally known as pear

- Black bean

- Kidney bean

- Roselle locally known as sorrel

- Tamarind also locally known as tambran

- Starfruit

- Golden apple

- Craboo

- Jackfruit

- Pineapple

- Malay apple

- Vinegar

- Recado

- Masa

- Maize

- Curry

Popular Belizeaan Dishes:

- Ceviche

- Fry jack

- Conch fritter

- Dukunu

- Hudut

- Bile up

- Tamales

- Curry chicken

- Rice and beans - rice stewed with beans and coconut milk

- Garnaches

- Panades

- Salbutes

- Burritos

- Brown stew chicken

- Brown stew beef

- Caldo

- Escoveitch fish

- Conch soup

- Callaloo and saltfish

- Cabbage and saltfish

- Steamed fish

- Cowfoot


Tourism Observer