Craxi Adventures: 481. Make tamales

Back when I wrote my bucket list, I had really good tamales at a Mexican restaurant in DePere and decided to add make tamales to my bucket list. Why? Who knows since my family doesn't eat Mexican and tamales aren't really a quick dish to assemble.

Fast forward many years and Danielle kept telling me about her friend Yolanda and her tamales. I kept pestering Danielle that we need to help make tamales with her so I can cross it off the bucket list. Finally a few weeks ago when I stopped over with some soup for Danielle we set a date for tamales.

Tamales are a traditional Mexican dish where a corn dough filled with meat and then wrapped in a corn husk and steamed. Usually when tamales are made, you get a lot of tamales in one batch because why go through all that work for only a few tamales. It is usually a family affair that takes all day.

In all honesty, tamales really aren't that time consuming or difficult if you have several people helping. If you are trying to do it all yourself, I can see why it would be a daunting task.

Besides shopping, there are really three stages to tamales -- prepping, filling, steaming. Okay four -- devouring.

Prepping

First you need to cook your meat and let it cool so you can shred it. Danielle cook the pork the night before. Yolanda cut it up in big chunks. We then shredded it. Cooking the meat is probably one of the most time consuming tasks because it to cook until it falls apart then cool so you don't burn your fingers when you try to shred it.

When I arrived, we had to cut all the peppers and tomatoes. We were making mild and spicy tamales so we had guajillo pepper, jalapeno peppers, and tomatillos. Yolanda put me to work to cut up the guajillo peppers. To do this, I snapped of the stem and then sliced the pepper down the seem and pulled out the seeds. I did this for about 2 pounds of peppers. That's a lot of guajillo peppers. Good thing I wore gloves since my fingers would have been orange.

In the mean time Yolanda prepped the jalapenos and tomatillos.

Once all the peppers were ready, we had to cook them to soft them up. While they were cooking, we shredded the pork. Multi-tasking at it's finest.

After the peppers were cooked, we had to puree them. Each kind of pepper/tomatillos beat to pulp in the blender. After we pureed the guajillo peppers, it had to be strained so we could remove the remaining skin. That was messy... or maybe I just made it messy.

Then it was time to mix the peppers, tomatillos, and seasonings into the meat. Since we initially didn't have enough jalapenos for the spicy tamales, we cut up some more and let them cook. That nearly killed us all. The smell of the jalapenos nearly choked us to death. Danielle and I ended up going outside for a breather.

The last step in prepping was to make the masa or corn dough. Yolanda bought 15 pounds of masa but we only used 10 pounds. To the masa we added some of the pureed chilis, some lard, some of the broth from the pork and some seasoning. Then mixed it together until it fell off your hands.

Now it was time to fill the tamales.

Filling

The corn husks have been soaking in water this whole time. If you don't soak the corn husks, they don't fold and it's a mess. Soak them until they are nice and soft.

Filling is a three step process.

1. Hold the corn husk in the palm of your hand and spread a fine layer of masa on the bottom half of it. Don't spread it too thick or your outer dough will be thick. You want to leave a nice edge at the bottom and sides.

2. Add a dollop or two of the meat mixture on top of the masa. Don't worry about spreading it out. This was had for me at first. I wanted to spread it but learned just a dollop or two and move on.

3. Fold the sides to the middle and then fold the top down.

This step is best to have many people helping. We had two people spreading masa, two people putting on the meat, and one person folding. The more hands you have the faster it goes. Remember we had 10 pounds of masa to spread.

Steaming

Tamales need to steam a good 45 minutes to an hour. Unlike pickles or jam, you can stuff that pot full of tamales.

You want make sure you put a steamer basket (or something similar) and extra corn husks at the bottom. Then fill with some water.

Then you just start standing up those tamales. We got over 100 tamales in the pot plus over 3 dozen in the roaster plan. The bigger the pot, the longer they take to cook. When the top once are done, you know the bottom ones are done.

Devouring

I am picky about my tamales. I do not like a tamale with thick masa. These tamales are perfect. We devoured over a dozen tamales before we had to pack them up and take them home.