6 of Belize's best chef's brought home the silver medal from the Taste of the Caribbean competition in Miami. The team got silver for the Caribbean National Team of the Year category. It was their first time participating and it was highly competitive. But they did very well going up against 16 countries with some tough senior teams. We welcomed them back to Belize at the airport and they told us how they stood out among their competitors.
Rob Pronk - Team Captain
"We went to Miami with team Belize, culinary team Belize. It was a very intense competition. It is the culinary Olympics of the Caribbean. 5 days of competing basically, we did extremely well, very much better than we expected. We are happy, we are proud. We brought back the medals."
Sean Kuylen - Chef
"When we say that we are going to Taste of Caribbean, we had to have a strategy, so I tell the coach we don't know what we are going to prepare ourselves with because everyone in the Caribbean have coconut, sea food, the same things, so we went with a different approach. So we said that Belize is very unique, we are the mainland, we are Central American and the Caribbean so we have the Maya, the Mestizo, we have chocolate, we have "recado negro", "recado rojo" so that was our approach. So we don't know what they will give us to cook and on our mystery day we got beef, we got whole chicken and we got pork so we made a relleno negro."
Einar Marin - Junior Chef
"We felt confident after the first day, from the first day at 3:05 we made an impact because so many people came to our table. They were interested in what we did from a simple panty ripper that we had. There was a big explosion for everybody that we ran out of food and panty ripper."
Sean Kuylen - Chef
"If they didn't hear about Belize, they know about Belize now, I am telling you."
Four of the teammates also got bronze medals in the Chef of the year, Pastry Chef and Bartender categories. Trinidad and Tobago came in first.
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