1 post tagged “tamales”
On Sunday, a couple of friends had the idea to come over and make tamales. None of us are Mexican, but I like to embrace any Christmas tradition that involves large amounts of good, homemade food. If you'd like to try this at home, heed this warning: it will take you all day. We started at 1:00 pm and finished around 11:00. There is a lot of downtime, though, so it's fun to do with several people. And, if we knew what we were doing, it would probably go faster - next year will be a cinch (meaning, less than 10 hours for a measly 45 tamales).
So, here are the instructions, along with some helpful tips. We followed Tamara's recipe. First, get your desired ingredients. You can make a tamale out of virtually anything. Our tamales were: chicken mole, pork and tomatillo sauce, vegetarian (peppers, cheese, and mushrooms), chicken/tomatillo/mushrooms/cheese, and the sweet ones (rum raisins, pineapple, dried papaya, and walnuts).
The most important ingredient, of course, is love. (awww....)
Soak the corn husks (to make them pliable).
And husk the tomatillos.
Put on some jammin' music. (For you eagle-eyed details people: yes, that is a Bee Gees album. Oh yeah). Pour yourself a tasty refreshment. Make it something good. (Life is too short to drink cheap beer).
Trim fat off the chicken and boil it whole, with a large onion, some celery, and garlic. Tear a husk into small strips - these will be used for tying off the tamales. We dyed the strips into different colors so we could identify the tamales (brown for chicken mole, orange for pineapple, red for pork, etc.). For the tomatillo sauce, put all the tomatillos, two medium onions, and the jalapeno peppers into a pot, cover with water, and boil for 15 minutes.
Roast the remaining peppers (we used pasilla and anaheim). Best to do over an open flame. Peel the skin off. Put them into a blender, with the boiled tomatillo mixture (including the water). Let cool, and add salt and pepper to taste. You must, of course, have some tortilla chips on hand to test the sauce as you go.
Prepare the masa. This is the hard part. You should do it by hand, gently adding the corn flour and the chicken stock alternately. If you use a beater, it gets too crumbly. The end result should look like spackle.
Gently dry the corn husks. Prepare the ingredients.... Grate the cheese. Shred the chicken and pork (which we broiled, since the grill ran out of gas). Make the mole sauce, and cook the mushrooms. Soak the raisins in rum, if you so desire.
Whew. Make yourself a tiki drink.
Spread a thin layer of masa onto a corn husk (the thinner the better). The masa should cover just the middle latitude, and go all the way to one side (but leave some empty husk on the other side - which will be the top fold). Fill your husk with ingredients, then tie off the ends. (I like to tie off both ends, some people just tie off one end). Practice makes perfect. Place the tamales into a steamer, so they're standing vertically. Then, steam them for an hour. Make sure there's always water in the pot - sometimes it completely evaporates and you could start a fire. (Ooopsie! Don't worry - no fire, just set off the alarm a few times).
Enjoy your tamales with friends and family!
If you're feeling (very) brave, try a piece of the habanero pepper.
Voila!
