Belize, Tamales

Welcome to Belize and believe me this one was a doozy. Belize is found in Central America by Mexico and Guatemala. As I write this post on November 5th I must say Belize is intelligent enough to not celebrate daylight savings time. Which I will die on this hill, is a stupid thing we do as a country!

Belize has many protected and beautiful natural areas with a wide arrange of differe t wild life including tapirs, howler monkeys, jaguars, sharks whales, and over 450 different fish. Belize is also covered with hundreds of ancient Mayans ruins. For this week I made the foolish choice of making Tamales. I used a recipe from Familia Kitchen https://familiakitchen.com/dona-paulas-tamales-from-belize/

Now don't get me wrong tamales are awesome. Who doesn't like delicious little rolls of meat and spices. I did not realize however how difficult this is to actually make. Kudos to every Latin American who makes these beautiful, tasty, difficult, and pain in the ass little treats. First you need to make a dough out of corn flour. I have never worked with such a difficult flour before. It is incredibly strong and thick. My arms killed after kneading this for what felt like an hour. Then you have to get the dough thin enough to cook well but strong enough to hold the fillings. In addition you have to wrap this in banana leaves and tie both ends with twine. It was very labor intensive and I made the stupid decision to make this on a Monday night!

Then I made a delicious col, a Belize traditional red sauce and chicken. This was awesome and would go great on some rice lol.

I could of used some help on the rolling aspect I am afraid my dough was too thick and the banana leaves were not the best.

Overall I give this a 7 out of ten. Mostly due to me own mistakes. I bet if I had one made by someone else this would of easily recieved a 9. I loved the filling but the corn was undercooked and too thick. Now all I need to do is find out what to do with the rest of all this corn flour!

Check in next time for Benin Atassi.

Current Rankings:

3rd place Bahrain's Machboos

2nd place Argentina's Asado

1st place Belgium's Steak Frites