Dinner59

Dinner in Belize often features slow-cooked stews, grilled meats, seafood dishes, and comforting soups that bring together many of the country’s culinary traditions. Evening meals tend to be flavorful and filling, often centered around rice, beans, corn, or root vegetables paired with seasoned meats or fish.

One of the most recognizable Belizean dinner dishes is stewed chicken, which is simmered in recado seasoning and served with rice and beans. Other traditional dinner recipes include seafood stews, hudut, caldo soups, and roasted or grilled meats that reflect both Garifuna and Mestizo influences.

Belize’s coastal geography also means seafood plays an important role in many dinner recipes. Fish, shrimp, and conch are commonly prepared with coconut milk, citrus, and local spices.

This category features Belizean dinner recipes that highlight the rich flavors and cultural influences that shape everyday cooking across the country.

Fresh loroco flower buds, the Guatemalan finishing ingredient for pollo en crema
Pollo en Crema Dinner

Pollo en Crema

Pollo en crema is a Central American dish of bone-in chicken in a cultured-cream sauce built on tomatillo or tomato, with guisquil, carrot, and potato. The Guatemalan version is vegetable-forward, mildly seasoned, and often finished with loroco. It is everyday food — the kind of Sunday pot that feeds the whole table — and it won the 2011 AGEXPORT competition for most representative Guatemalan dish in the loroco variant. Every July, Chimaltenango hosts a festival celebrating it. That is not a country hedging about its cuisine. Ingredients The sauce is…
Isela Post
June 11, 2026
Dried red chiles in a stone molcajete, the recado base for hilachas
Hilachas Dinner

Hilachas

Short answer: Hilachas is a Guatemalan home stew of beef shredded into fine threads and simmered in a tomato-and-tomatillo recado built on guajillo chiles, cinnamon, and cloves, with potato, carrot, and green beans cooked in. The name means rags or threads, for the way long-simmered flank steak pulls apart into strands. It is a ladino dish — everyday comedor food, not Maya heritage — and its signature is a double process: you cook the beef until it shreds, then separately build and fry a smooth recado before combining them. That…
Joe Post
June 11, 2026
Fresh tomatillos, the green base of the sauce for Guatemalan jocón
Jocón Dinner

Jocón

Short answer: Jocón is one of Guatemala's four great Maya recados: chicken simmered in a bright green sauce of tomatillos, scallions, cilantro, epazote, and green chiles, with body from toasted pumpkin and sesame seeds ground fine and a little torn tortilla. The name comes from the K'iche' word jok'om, meaning mashed or ground — a direct reference to that seed-grinding step at the heart of the technique. It is a dish of the western highlands, declared national Intangible Cultural Heritage of Guatemala in 2007, and it is the stew that…
Joe Post
June 11, 2026
Joroches Recipe Dinner

Joroches Recipe

In Mérida, you find joroches on the table without ceremony. A bowl of black beans, a few masa balls floating in it, chiltomate over the top. That is the whole dish. Simple food, Maya food. It feeds you. On this side of the border we know it too. The name, the beans, the way you work the dough between your palms. Some people call them joloches. The word is the same. Just the tongue moves different. What are joroches? Joroches (also spelled joloches) are small corn masa balls cooked directly…
Fili Post
May 29, 2026
Maya woman in traditional dress standing in adobe kitchen with cooking pots — chulibuul, Belize
Chulibuul Recipe Dinner

Chulibuul Recipe

Chulibuul is a pre-Hispanic Maya bean and corn soup from the Yucatan Peninsula. You grind the tender corn kernels and that is the thickener. No flour, no starch. Beans and ground corn together give a complete protein the old way, before meat was the center of every pot. Make this when the corn and beans are fresh and tender. Editor's Note: Sometimes Yucatecan Chulibuul is spelt Chulibul or Chulibull but don't confuse it with the Asian dish "Chulbuli" which is a type of chutney. Ingredients 8 ears tender corn (elotes),…
Fili Post
May 29, 2026
chocolomo recipe steaming meat and broth on ladle belize
Chocolomo Recipe Dinner

Chocolomo Recipe

Chocolomo is a Maya organ meat stew from northern Belize and the Yucatan Peninsula, made from beef or pork heart, tripe, loin, liver, and kidney slow-cooked with recado, bitter orange, charred onion, garlic, and fresh mint. A post-slaughter dish by tradition, it is prepared the same day the animal is butchered. In Xaibe, when you butchered a pig or res, you cooked chocolomo that same day. The heart, the tripe, the liver, the kidneys. Those went into the pot first, and nothing was wasted. Corozal and Chetumal are separated by…
Fili Post
May 29, 2026
panucho-recipe-belize-yucatan-chetumal
Panuchos Yucatecos Dinner

Panuchos Yucatecos

Panuchos yucatecos are small corn tortillas cooked dry on a comal until they puff, then split open and stuffed with seasoned black beans before being fried in lard. They are topped with shredded meat, cabbage, pickled onion, and avocado.
Fili Post
June 1, 2026
Bowl of tapado, the Garifuna coconut seafood stew of the Honduran coast, with fish, plantain, and yuca
Tapado Dinner

Tapado

Tapado is the Garifuna coconut seafood stew of the Honduran Caribbean coast, a one-pot dish of whole fish, shrimp, and shellfish simmered with green plantain, yuca, and fresh coconut milk, seasoned with culantro and annatto. The coastal version, tapado costeño, is sweet and creamy; the inland tapado olanchano uses meat instead. A pot of tapado tells you where you are before you taste it. The smell of coconut milk thickening over fish, the green plantain and yuca going soft in the broth, a whole fish laid across the top of…
Isela Post
June 11, 2026
Belizean Creamed Callaloo Soup Recipe
Callaloo Dinner

Callaloo

Our Belizean Creamed Callaloo Soup recipe is a blend of nutritious callaloo leaves and cream, this soup is a comforting, heartwarming dish.
Joe Post
May 29, 2026
Belizean Picadillo Recipe - Completed Recipe for Pork Meatballs in Chirmole Soup Belize Style Black Dinner
Belizean White Relleno Recipe Dinner

Belizean White Relleno Recipe

Today, we're taking a deep dive into the heart of Belizean cuisine with a classic dish that's bound to captivate your taste buds: the Belizean White Relleno. This recipe combines rich flavors and textures, making it a perfect choice for family gatherings or special occasions. Relleno Blanco or White Relleno is a favorite Belizean dish around holidays and New Year's Eve celebrations. Relleno Blanco is related to the typical Relleno (single word, implying "black" or "negro"). They both share similar spice flavor profiles but they differ in that White Relleno…
Fili Post
May 29, 2026