Belizean Stew(ed) Beans (the secret ingredient is the Pigtail)

I love stewed beans-called "stew beans" in Belizean Kriol. Everyone eats them in Belize and although the seasonings are a bit different with the traditional Mayan preparation, in any restaurant you will find this version, which uses salted pigtail to add a savory flavour to the already delicious bean gravy. If you want a vegetarian recipe for stew beans which features more Mayan-style flavorings found in some communities in Stann Creek and Toledo Districts check out my earlier post here.

Belizean Stew/ed Beans

Makes 4-5 cups of beans. I usually make double this amount so I have plenty on hand for re-fried beans, bean based soups, bean dip and other fun foods. 

Ingredients:
2 cups of red kidney or black beans (red kidney beans are traditional, coming to Belize first as ballast in ships from New Orleans that arrived to purchase prized Belizean mahogany in the 1800s). 

Water

1 allspice or bay leaf

Whole cumin seed, at least one teaspoon

Oregano, dried or fresh, to taste

Fresh garlic cloves, cut into several pieces, to taste.

One medium or half a large onion, diced.

Coconut oil, at least two tablespoons

Salt-brined Pigtail (fished by hand out of 5 gallon buckets in every grocery store) is the traditional pork flavoring device used in Belizean stew beans. If you don't want any pork product in your beans you can omit it, otherwise, ham hock, a fatty thick cut bacon or some other salty porky item can substitute for the pigtail. This is for flavour and to add something meaty to chew on when chowing down on your hearty plate of stewed beans.

If you do not use a salted pork product in your beans, you will want 1 teaspoon of salt or to taste.

Procedure:

1. Wash the beans to rid them of dust and pick out any debris (in Belize it is not uncommon to find an occasional tiny stone in the beans).

2. Cover the beans with at least twice the amount of water as there is beans. You will most likely have to add more during the cooking process. There are several ways to speed up the cooking process. One is by putting the beans in the water and letting them soak for 8-12 hours. If you work all day, just prep the beans in water before you go to work, then you can cook them in the evening and use them the next day or later that night. You can also soak the beans overnight and cook them the next morning. Otherwise you can put the pot of beans and water on the stove, bring them to a boil, boil hard for ten minutes, then let them soak for several hours. This will also cut down on total cooking time.If you don't want to soak the beans it will take a couple hours to cook them, but this is a great thing to do on a long evening or morning at home while you are working on other things.

3. Cook the beans: add the coconut oil, garlic, cumin seeds, oregano and allspice or bayleaf to the pot with the water and beans. DO NOT add any salt or the salted pork product at this point. It will only cause the skin on the beans to toughen. Then bring to a boil and let cook at a fast simmer/almost boil with the lid on. If the beans threaten to boil over, just crack the lid. The beans will begin to absorb water and some will evaporate so check on them every now and then, add water if needed so they are well covered, and stir to make sure they don't stick to the bottom.

4. After a while pull up a spoon of beans and blow on them. If the skin on the beans peels back when you do so, they are getting soft and its time to season the beans. Add your pork product (or salt) if you are using it and the diced onion. Continue to simmer until the flavors have melded and the beans are completely soft and delicious swimming in their own gravy. Correct the seasonings as needed. Serve over coconut rice with Belizean stew/ed chicken , fried plantain and potato salad or coleslaw for a classic Belizean Sunday meal.

Breadnut, Chestnut of the Tropics

Breadnut or Artocarpus Camansi, is the ancestor of breadfruit, the more widely known green football (soccer-ball) shaped starchy tropical fruit found across the warm regions of the world. Unlike the breadfruit, the breadnut is full of seeds. When ripe the fruit softens and falls to the ground. That's where I found this one, under a tree on my parents' farm. In the photo below you can see the very soft fruit, with its soft green spiny exterior. The seeds, to the right, comprise up to 50% of the weight of the fruit and can be easily removed from the ripe flesh.

According to the National Tropical Botanical Garden website, the seeds of the breadnut are low in fat (6-29%) and high in protein (13-20%) compared to seeds such as the almond and are a good source of minerals. All I know is that they are delicious if properly prepared, with a flavour and texture very much like that of chestnuts. Breadnut, although originally from New Guinea and Indonesia, is not common in Oceania like the breadfruit but has spread across the Caribbean, so you might find it there. If so you have stumbled across a versatile seed that can be treated exactly as chestnuts would be. In the photo above you can see the seeds embedded in the breadnut's ripe flesh, below are the seeds themselves.

                                                                                                                                                          Drop the seeds into hot salted water and give them a boil for about 10 minutes, then peel the thin shell off (once they have cooled a bit) to reveal delicious chestnut like goodness. This can be mashed with butter, put into a stuffing, glazed with sugar syrup to make "breadnut glacee" or blended with some rich stock to make a filling and delicate soup. They can also be roasted for an even more intense flavour. If you live in the tropics or run across a breadnut sometime, it is worth experimenting with! Fruits are also harvested green by pulling them off the tree and cooked seeds and all in soups and stews. Let me know if you have ever eaten breadnut seeds and what you made with them.

Belizean Coconut Rice

Traditionally the Creole and Garifuna people of Belize cook their rice with coconut milk. This style of rice making has spread to all the cultural groups in Belize with the happy result that whether you are Maya, Hispanic, Creole, Garifuna, East Indian or even Mennonite, if you are eating rice, chances are high that coconut milk might be in it. Many a rice and beans joint around the country are judged on whether their rice and beans and their white rice are cooked with the right amount and quality of coconut milk.

In Belize the average cook can go to the grocery store and purchase canned or even (gasp) powdered coconut milk, imported from far off places like Taiwan and The Philippines, but the traditional and by far the BEST way to make coconut milk is from scratch.

Never fear, it is not as hard as it may seem! In just ten minutes you can go from coconut in a shell to coconut milk. In Belize we have a variety of graters that are commonly used for coconuts. However, if  you have a powerful blender or a food processor, it can do the grating for you. And if all that is laying around the house  is a box grater, that'll work too.

First step is to open the coconut. Starting with a husked coconut, set it on a sturdy surface like a counter-top and hit with a hammer along the midriff of the coconut (halfway between the end with the three eyes and the pointy end) until it begins to crack open. Let the coconut water (the off-clear liquid inside) drain into a bowl. Now take a sturdy butter knife or an oyster knife and pry the coconut meat out of the shell. You can at this point grate it on a box grater on the smaller holed side, or you can put it in a powerful blender or food processor along with the coconut water. Blend or process until the meat is in tiny pieces. If you are grating by hand, take the finely grated meat and mix with the coconut water, mashing and blending by hand or with a potato masher, until the water looks milky white. At this stage, whether you are blending, processing or mixing by hand, pour the whole mess into a cloth and squeeze the heck out of it over a bowl until all the white coconut milk comes out.

This stuff is gold. In Belize and across the English speaking Caribbean it is used to cook rice, beans, fish, make bread, season soups and stews and concoct delicious desserts and puddings. But today we are simply going to make rice, the staff of life for more than a billion people across the globe.

When I was a child I learned two ways of making rice-my mother's way and my father's way. My mother's way was to measure out 2 cups of rice and a teaspoon of salt, boil 4 cups of water, then dump in the rice and salt, stir once, let it come to a boil, then simmer on low with the lid on until the rice was done. My father's way was what I call the Belizean way, because he learned his rice-making technique from machete wielding bush-masters in Toledo, the most rural district in Belize. It is the way I always use. Take as much rice as you think you will need (one cup of dry rice is usually enough for two people). Put it in a pot, run water over it and wash the rice, pouring out the water until the water runs clear instead of becoming cloudy with starch. Then put enough coconut milk (or water or broth if you don't want coconut rice) in the pot so that it reaches to the first joint on your index finger when the tip of your finger is touching the rice (this is much simpler than it sounds. Stick your finger in the pot until you touch the rice, and look down. Is the liquid up to the first joint of your index finger? Yes? Ok, you're good).

Put the pot over high heat with the lid off and let it come to a boil. When it has boiled until there is only a little liquid left over the top of the grains (which usually only takes a few minutes), turn the heat down to very low, put the lid on, and let simmer for about 20 minutes (30 for brown rice) until the grains have absorbed all the liquid and are not tough or crunchy when you taste one. Turn off the burner and let the rice sit in the pot with the lid on for another couple minutes before you serve it.

Now offering Food and Agriculture tours in Belize!

 Believe it or not, my year of dissertation research on food, tourism and identity in Placencia, Belize is winding to a close. Now that I have moved back to my home country I have to make a living. The ivory tower is not where I want to spend my whole life and career, I much rather spend time outdoors than staring at a computer screen and for that reason I have started a business. Its a small tour company named Cayequest Tours, based out of Placencia, Belize. We offer sea and inland tours of southern Belize and most importantly, we offer food and agricultural tours! I launched a chocolate tour in January (the first out of Placencia) and it has been going great. Spice farm, hot sauce factory and banana plantation tours are in the works. We even have a website (well, a blog). Check it out: Cayequest Tours.

If you have ever thought about coming to Belize for vacation, I hope you will come through Placencia and perhaps go on a tour with me! Although dissertation write up and tour company operation has been taking up a lot of time, I do not intend to abandon this blog. It has seen little activity over the past several years, but I do hope to continue to update, especially with recipes and thoughts on food in Belize. It it due to this blog that I am here in Placencia, doing what I am doing, and loving it, so I want to keep giving back to the blogger community out there and contributing to information on the web about food in Belize. I hope you will keep reading and check back for future updates!
 

Chocolate in Belize and the Toledo Cacao Festival

This expensive slicer allows samples of cacao beans to be inspected for quality to ensure that proper fermentation and drying is taking place.

For the past 6 years in my home district of Toledo, Belize, an exciting food event know as "Cacaofest" has been taking place. Toledo District, the southernmost of our six districts, is home to the majority of cacao cultivation in the country, as well as being the birthplace of the Toledo Cacao Growers Association (TCGA). The cacao produced for TCGA is certified organic and fairtrade. For years all of it was exported to Milan, Italy to be converted into Green and Black's "Maya Gold" chocolate bar; the world's first Fairtrade chocolate bar, developed in 1994 specifically to showcase the indigenous flavors of the Toledo District.

However, a wonderful development over the past few years has been the establishment IN COUNTRY of several chocolate companies, producing some really high quality chocolate. Goss Chocolate, Cotton Tree Chocolate, Kakaw-The Belize Chocolate Company and Cyrilas Chocolate are at the forefront of what looks to be a cacao boom driven by a new wave of chocolate obsession in Europe and North America.

At the same time, Green and Blacks, once an independently owned fairtrade company, was sold to Cadbury Schwepps which was later purchased by Altria Group, to form part of the Kraft Corporation!

I strongly believe that value added processing of our cacao IN BELIZE is a great step forward for the country-a step away from neo-colonial chains of production and consumption (as illustrated by the Kraft acquisition of Green and Blacks) and towards greater benefits for the Belizean economy. I admit to a personal bias in this matter, as my parents are members of TCGA and I grew up planting, caring for, harvesting and processing cacao for sale to the cooperative. To my knowledge we are the only non-Maya members of the cooperative. To learn more about the formation of the cooperative and the role of the Fairtrade Movement, go here: Fairtrade Foundation-TCGA.

As a result of the growing demand for Belizean cacao and the new in-country production of high quality chocolates, tourism and agriculture came together in the creation of  Toledo Cacao Festival, held towards the end of May every year. I have always been stuck in the USA when this festival took place. So you can imagine my glee at finally being able to attend this time around! I made the chocolate and wine tasting as well as the street festival the next day and ate so many free samples that I can honestly say I was sick and tired of chocolate by the end of the trip. It was amazing to see how many companies are coming to Belize buying locally produced cacao. Thanks to the new Chocolate Obsession in the United States of America, the demand seems higher than the supply and farmers have no problem selling their organic fairtrade cacao at premium prices to local and foreign chocolate companies.

The traditional metate used to grind everything from corn to cacao-making chocolate the Maya way at Cyrila's Chocolate Company. Notice the open cacao pod with fresh, unprocessed beans at the bottom of the picture.



Cyrila's is currently the only Belizean (Maya) owned chocolate company in the country. Hopefully the first of many!

Cotton Tree Chocolate Company right on Front Street in Punta Gorda Town produces a variety of chocolates including my favorite: a fantastic milk chocolate bar with cacao nibs; and gives a tour with free samples!

A new middle-man company, Moho River Cacao does its own in-house fermentation and drying and sells the resulting dried cacao to several small batch gourmet chocolate companies in the USA and Canada.

Ms. Zenobia vending handmade bags featuring cacao designs as well as her own home-produced cooking chocolate, hand-formed into balls. Cacao pods decorate the table.

Belizean Conch Soup

Conch soup is a traditional coastal dish in Belize. Queen conches are those big beautiful snail shells you see photos of in ads for the Caribbean. Being a large snail, they are also full of delicious muscle, with a hint of sweetness like a scallop, and the toughness of something that inches along on its foot. There is a way around that however. First you knock a hole in the pointy end of the shell, then you stick a knife in the hole and cut the conch where it attaches to its shell. Then you pull it out, as in the picture below:

 Once you have it out you cut off the guts, eyes and the thick yellowish "skin" leaving a white tasty yet tough muscle. Now, grab a hammer or better yet, a meat mallet, and beat the crap out of that foot until it tenderizes. Cut it up into pieces and you are ready to make conch ceviche or conch soup, or just add some wasabi and soy and enjoy as is-a real island treat when out fishing for the day:



Conch soup takes these tenderized pieces of sweet deliciousness and turns them into a hearty and filling stew made with a brown flour roux.

Conch soup is one of those traditional dishes made by "feel", with ingredients varying according to what is at hand and what each cook prefers, but some items are mandatory.

Ingredients:

• At least a pound or two of cleaned, tenderized conch cut into big bite sized pieces.
• One salt brined piece of pigtail or other similar salty pork product.
• Garlic
• Onion
• Sweet Pepper
• Some kind of what we call in Belize "Groundfoods". Sweet potato, coco-yam, cassava, breadfruit or green banana or plantain can be used, cut into large chunks so they wont dissolve as they cook.
• Some firm ripe plantain to add a sweet balance to the dish
• If you want to throw in okra, chayote or any other addition, feel free. This dish is flexible.
• Tomatoes are a common addition to the pot if you desire.
• Flour
• Coconut oil
• Seasonings: I like cilantro or culantro and a big leafed tropical oregano that is common throughout Belize and which some people call "thyme". Fresh ground black pepper. The brined pigtail is salty, so dont add salt til you have tasted the finished product.

 Procedure:

1. Cut up the pigtail into pieces and heat up several tablespoons of coconut oil in a heavy bottomed pot. Toss in the pigtail and 3-4 tablespoons of flour and stir vigorously until the flour-oil mixture turns a medium brown.
2. Add chopped up onion, garlic, sweet pepper, ground foods and other ingredients (okra, tomatoes, whatever else you are adding) except for the conch. Saute for a few minutes then add water to cover the ingredients.
3. Simmer until the groundfoods are cooked through then add the ripe plantain and conch and cook until tender.
4. Serve with habanero pepper sauce and a cold glass of lime juice to cut the heaviness of the meal. Traditionally rice cooked with coconut milk is served with these hearty stews, but it is already filling without that addition.

In Belize this is a dish that is considered to help cure a hangover and also is thought to improve sexual stamina and performance. It also happens to be delicious.

Belizean-style Habanero Pepper Sauce

I originally posted a recipe for homemade habanero pepper sauce (also called onion sauce, depending on the ratio of onions to peppers) in my post on serre, a classic Belizean fish preparation. However, this ubiquitous sauce really deserves a post of its own.

Pepper or Onion sauce
This is an essential accompaniment to many Belizean dishes. Dont eat serre or other coconut milk based foods without it-the acidity of the lime and vinegar and the heat of the habanero cut the richness of the coconut milk and create a perfect balance of flavor. Whether you call it pepper or onion sauce depends on the ratio of onion to habanero-go with what works best for your tastebuds and heat preference.

Habanero peppers

Onion

Cilantro (optional)

Carrot (optional)

Lime juice

Vinegar

Preparation: Mince an onion and add to taste a quantity of finely minced habanero pepper. Remove the seeds and white internal membrane if you want to tone down the heat even more. Add minced cilantro, lime juice, vinegar and salt to taste. Some people like more vinegar, some like more lime juice. Experiment and see which you prefer. Let the whole concoction sit in a glass container. You can leave it covered on the counter for several weeks and it will stay perfectly fresh as the onion and pepper pickle themselves in the lime juice and vinegar.

NOTE: Most Belizeans do not mince the onion or habanero pepper, instead slicing them up into bigger pieces as you see in the photo above. I mince it because I like to have little bits of habanero all over my food. Its up to you which you prefer. Some folks use large chunks of pepper and onion and then never actually dip the pepper out, instead leaving it to flavour the vinegar, which is used to spice up food, and the pickled onions. Some people also add sliced carrots and even cucumber to the jar, which makes for some very spicy and delicious pickles.

Serve this with Serre and other heavy stews, with refried beans at breakfast, on top of guacamole or anytime you need some hot pepper flavour.