For the women of the Ruiz family tamalada, the payoff — thousands of tamales — is almost as good as the event itself.
The hispanic women at my wife's church make tamales and sell them once a month as their way of contributing to the church. I LOVE tamales, although the masa is often made with lard. What was it George Carlin said, "Bacon is worth dying for"? Tamales are about that good. Especially with some good, chunky salsa on them to give them a little moisture, fiber, and Vitamin C. MMMMMMMM!!!!
I did not know it was Christmas only.
Eating tamales is my favorite family tradition and you don't have to be hispanic.
Realistically, it takes two days to make tamales. There are six separate stages to the process: The meat, the sauce, and the masa, the hojas (corn husks) and the instructions for combining them all, and the steaming.
Buy a cheap bone-in pork roast or maybe two. You want a total of about six or seven pounds to end up with enough meat to do them properly.
Cover the pork roast(s) with at least 8 cups of water and cook slowly until very tender. Use either in a crock pot (6-8 hours?) or in a large pot on the stove (3-4 hours?). To the pot, add two heaping tsp. of minced garlic, one large chopped onion, and a couple stalks of chopped celery. Salt and pepper to taste. The goal here is to season the broth, not so much the roast(s). I also toss in ten or twenty hot chilis like de arbol or japonicas to give the broth a little twang.
When the roast is not pink in the center, and almost falls apart with a fork, it’s done. Take it out, put it in a zip-lok baggie, and cool it down until you’re ready to put the tamales together. Save the broth – you’ll need six cups to make the masa, and a little to add to the chili sauce. (Remove the chilis from the broth, but leave the other stuff. You will add the onions and celery to the meat sauce.)
I usually stop at this point and make the other stuff the following day, but you can continue on if you are muy macho.
You need to soak the corn husks (some people use banana leaves, but they are harder to find) for at least four hours prior to putting the tamales together. I put them in a large pot and weigh them down with something to keep them under water.
The garden variety hojas you find in the supermarket are OK, but there is a lot of waste. Some of them will be too skinny to wrap tamales, and you have to discard those. I recently found a premium brand at a Mexican tienda which were almost all useable: The brand is ORALE! Hoja para tamal enconchada.
The easy way is to buy the sauce ready made, but here in the East, it’s hard to find. You will need two 28 oz. cans of Las Palmas red chili sauce, or you can use about five 10 oz. cans of enchilada sauce in whatever heat you want.
To make the sauce yourself, start with about twenty or thirty dried chilis – either California or New Mexico red chilis. I’m thinking this works out to about 8 oz. (Chili sauce is not my strong suit.)
Roast them on a cookie sheet in a 350-400 degree oven for about 3 minutes. More than that and they will burn. Don’t let that happen.
Remove them and submerge them in boiling hot water for about ten minutes until they are soft. You aren’t trying to cook them, just soften them.
When soft, remove the stems and seeds, and rinse them in cold, fresh water from the tap. Then toss as many as will fit into your blender, add maybe one cup of fresh water (not the water you steeped them in – it has a bitter taste) and another tsp. or two of minced garlic, and puree the chilis. Add the “stuff” from the bottom of the broth container – the celery, onions, etc. and puree it along with the chilis. You want the consistency to be like tomato sauce.
Meanwhile, in a saucepan, melt 4 TBSP. of bacon grease, lard, or Crisco. (Last batch I made, I was worried that the hickory smoke flavor in the bacon grease would taste funny, but it didn’t seem to.) Add 4 TBSP. of Wondra flour and stir like you were making gravy. When that is thoroughly mixed, add the chili puree from the blender, 1 TBSP. cumin, salt and pepper to taste. (I use Adobo rather than salt). Cook for about ten minutes to thicken.
Reserve about one cup of the chili sauce to add to the masa later on.
Remove the bones and shred or chop the pork you cooked previously, then add to the chili sauce. Also add one small jar of capers with juice (When people ask what they are, tell them some vague story about your pet rabbit getting loose). The pork is already cooked, so you are just trying to heat it up here.
In a very large bowl, place 8 cups of MA-SE-CA “Instant Corn Masa Mix”, or whatever brand you can find. MA-SE-CA makes one especially for tamales, but I haven’t tried it yet. Stir in 2 tsp. salt. With a fork, fold in 1 ½ cups of Crisco or lard (I use Crisco). Warm the pork broth you saved from earlier in the microwave then add 6 cups to the masa. Add 1 cup of chili sauce. (If you’re not using “instant” masa, I think you are supposed to add 2 TBSP. of baking powder. I added it anyway the last time, and it didn’t seem to hurt anything. Maybe it even helped.)
Mix well with your Chinese-made mixer until the dough has the consistency of cake frosting. (My mixer broke last time and I had to use my hands. It came out OK.) A small ball of the masa dough should barely sink when placed in a glass of cold water. You want the stuff to be spreadable with a spatula.
Select nice full hojas, and if you are right handed, place the pointy end to your left on a cutting board or large platter. With one of those rubber spatulas used for scraping things off the inside of bowls, spread the masa dough about 1/4" thick on the center part of the corn husk. There is an art to this. You want the masa to go all the way to the edge on one side, but only within about 1” on the other. Imagine that you will be rolling these up in a minute, and you will want one side of the corn husk to lap over the tamale to seal it like an envelop. You will get the hang of it after you try and roll up a few.
After the masa is spread, spoon a couple tablespoons of the pork/chili mixture into the center. Too much and it will squeeze out the ends and be wasted when you roll the tamale. I like to add a small black pitted olive in each one. Kind of a little surprise for lucky eater.
There are different ways to close up the tamales. The Mexicans are partial to folding them up, but I like to roll and tie them like the old XLNT brand tamales that you could buy in the store when I was a kid.
Rolled up tamales. Ideally, you want the masa to totally enclose the filling for esthetic reasons, but it really doesn’t matter. Lap one edge of the corn husk over the other to seal everything inside.
Then tie up each end with butcher’s twine. I cut a bunch of 8” pieces ahead of time. Trim off the excess twine after they are tied up, then set them aside. Don’t worry if they have sauce all over the outside. That will come clean when you steam them.
To fold them up, spread the masa and add the filling just the same. Forget the olive because these come out flat, not cylindrical. Fold the big end of the hoja over the masa, then the two sides. Then fold the whole thing in half like a book.
Another way to do it is to just use a big pot with some pint jars in the bottom, and a grate of some kind sitting on the jars to hold the tamales out of the water. This is probably the better way to do it, but I haven’t bothered to find a suitable grate, yet. This way, the lid seals better and the steam is assured of surrounding the tamales evenly.
Since everything except the masa is already cooked, so there are no health considerations regarding cooking time. Your goal is simply to steam the tamales until the masa is done. With “fat” tamales, I usually steam them for two hours. One hour might be enough with a smaller batch or skinnier tamales. (The thermodynamics alone would take weeks to explain...)
I tried using my 20Qt. pressure canner at 15PSI with this last batch, and it worked well. (I cooked them for one hour after closing the lid, which worked out to about 20 minutes at full pressure.)
Well, there you have it. Your back is tired, and your kitchen is a mess. Now you know why they’re so expensive to buy!
I’m not sure how many this recipe makes. 20-30 I think. It depends on your roll-up technique. They microwave well, and they freeze well.
What an excellent family tradition!
when we first got married my wife was a social worker at a nursing home - there was a cleaning woman from Laos who would prepare spring rolls - their taste was like no other - we used to buy them by the dozen and that would be our meal
My uncharitable take on this.... Just another feel good article about these oh so authentic tamale making 3rd world Mexican people. Giving a promotion to the on going illegal alien invasion. White people have no soul but folks from the 3rd world do. These articles out number anti illegal immigration articles by 100:1.
80 years ago it would have been the happy "darkies" eating watermelon in the summer
Bump for later read.
LOVE IT. THANKS.
Farmington, New Mexico
BTW, speaking of traditions, I thought this was pretty neat!
Reminds me of the days all the Ukrainian Aunts and Baba's would get together and make pirogies,borscht,petishka, (little buns stuffed with sauerkraut)paska and other dish's for the Ukrainian Christmas feast.
Rosa a lady where I work sometimes brings me home made tamales. :O)
A woman at my office has a tia or an abuelita (I forget which) who makes tamales for holidays. Pork and turkey, regular or spicy . . . I always get two dozen of each, spiced way up. Oh, MAN, is that ever good. I had some for lunch yesterday and will no doubt duplicate the feat today.
Nothin' beats Mama's family recipe of homemade tamales!
Great story.
My husband spent many years in Arizona and Texas and used to tell me the stories of the fresh tamales he used to get and how much he missed them.
I decided to surprise him by making them one day......how was I supposed to know it was an all day project, I'm a Irish kid from Brooklyn!!!!
I've been making them ever since.
BTTT
Now I've got to pay my neighbor a visit and look pitifully malnourished again (a real trick with that band of lard around my waist). She's going to start up her holiday tamale-making operation again in a few days, and I want in on the ground floor this time.
Yummy...reminds of the best tamales I ever had..in Panama City, Panama.
My next door neighbor used to make absolutely wonderful tamales.
She made pork, chicken and bean varieties. While the basic ingredients are always the same, the spicing is critical, as is the skill of the maker.
For her grandson's fifth birthday she made three coolers' worth of tamales. As a guest I stuffed myself.
There's virtually no relationship between homemade tamales and the grocery store variety.