Chefs train for career enhancement
Having waxed poetic over meat pies and been inspired by ideals, News 5’s Janelle Chanona is as close as we could find to a food reporter. This morning her beat took her to the Radisson where a group of aspiring chefs is receiving professional training in the culinary arts.
Janelle Chanona, Reporting
Dr. Patricia Wilson runs her kitchen at a frantic pace…
Amid the slicing, dicing, boiling and stirring, the professional chef is overseeing a four-course meal in the making.
Today, these fifteen Belizeans are her students, ready to absorb the basic tricks of the trade.
The proper way of wielding a knife is step one.
Dr. Patricia Wilson
“I tell everybody that this is a really good excuse if they have a broken heart, they can come to the kitchen and cut onions and they can cry and nobody has to know they are crying because they have a broken heart.”
“If you put them in the freezer or about the refrigerator for about a half an hour. It firms up a little bit because what’s making you…what’s bothering your eyes is all this liquid, all the acid in the onion so if you chill it down it’s not as bad.”
As another student demonstrated, playing with hot and cold might actually make your job easier.
Cooking Student
“When the water is to a boil, we put the tomato in there and then in a few seconds, thirty seconds, you just take them out and the skin will come off, we put them inna cold water and the skin will come off very easily.”
But not everything always goes according to plan.
Dr. Patricia Wilson
“No, you have to cook the rice fully. Was it cooked?”
Student
“Yeah.”
Dr. Patricia Wilson
“It was fully cooked? Yeah but no, no you have to strain it out. It has to be very, very little, strain all this liquid out. You have to add very little and stir it, stir it, stir it. So strain it out now.”
The cooking course is designed to give local dishes an international flare.
Dr. Patricia Wilson
“The way I’m trying to focus the course is taking those techniques, those classic techniques and applying them to the foods that are available in Belize. Rather than me coming in and doing outside food and outside products, which are very difficult, that seems to be the challenge finding a lot of the products and utilising that with the products here.”
Michelangelo Samuels, Cooking Student
“There is so much you can do with cooking. It’s not just cooking, you’re being creative and all that with it.”
For aspiring chef Samuels, this course is the springboard to his lifetime dream.
Michelangelo Samuels
“In high school, I did food and nutrition and I did a course at the Centre for Employment Training. I’m gearing up for a career in culinary arts. That’s my aspiration, to become one of Belize’s best chefs.”
Other students had more straightforward reasons for signing up.
Azucena Heredia, Cooking Student
“I’m a housewife and my husband enjoys my dinners.” (laughs) I need to find a job that I can do at home and take care of the family. I have three girls, so that’s my real concern.”
Janelle Chanona
“So you want to cook and sell food out of your home?”
Azucena Heredia
“Yeah, like a catering service.”
And like her chicken entrée gets my thumbs up too.
As Belize prepares to deal with a boom in tourism, these men and women are an important link between the visitors and their memories of the country.
Dr. Patricia Wilson
“The client here is coming for eco-tourism. They are coming expecting very healthy kinds of foods, but different foods. They are paying a lot of money and I think that we really need to differentiate what is the vision of the tourism of Belize and how can they as people working in kitchen…I expect to go into higher level jobs because that’s why they are taking this training. How can they work to really make Belize up there in the forefront with food.
Susan Vickstrom, Resort Owner/Cooking Student
“We like to introduce them to the fruits they don’t get in other countries. Sometimes we don’t know how to do that except one or two ways. She’s teaching us to be creative, to be diverse and to also present it in a way that’s appealing to their eyes as well as their palettes.”
And of course one side benefit of the training, is the chance to please your own palette. Reporting for News 5, I am Janelle Chanona.
The advanced section of the course begins on Monday and will climax with the serving of a five-course gourmet meal on Saturday. The training is organised by the Belize Hotel Association and Belize Tourism Board and carried out by Johnson and Wales University.
