Chefs whip up desserts

Last week we brought you a story on a culinary workshop for members of the tourism industry where the participants were making a variety of main dishes. But after a main course, comes dessert, and today, the chefs were whipping up something sweet and delicious.

Jacqueline Woods, Reporting

“We have our own, so we must work with our own.” That is the message Barbadian chef Carl W.H. Rice tells his students across the Caribbean. Rice has been in Belize for the past two weeks showing our chefs how they can use local ingredients and still get the same international effect.

Chef Carl Rice, Lecturer, Barbados Community College

“To bring about the type of pastries and desserts you often see in books and you think they come from far away, they can’t be ours. But with our own local ingredients we can provide, produce all of the things you see in the same books, the very pretty picture books. All of these things we work with today are from Belize and they are local, nothing was imported, everything is Belizean.”

The baking session was part two of a culinary art training that the Belize Tourism Training Unit along with the Belize Hotel Association has been sponsoring. This week the fifteen participants looked at pastries and desserts.

Vincent Palacio, Director, Tourism Training Unit

“People in the hotel and restaurant sector have been telling us that they need trained persons in the culinary arts, so we brought in a chef from Barbados who has partnered with a local chef and has been offering the program for us. It’s to bring up the level of training for the people in the food sector.”

The local chefs came from all over the country except Cayo. A similar training session will take place in that district on May seventeenth.