Our First Tamale Cooking Adventure

December 2009

Living in the South and in Texas it seems overdue for us to attempt to make tamales. I found this great recipe site which as a very detailed recipe with photos and tips. The owner sells a print version which is a real value at $5. and I recommend it if you want to try making these delights for yourself.

I will not post the recipe but if you click the basket of tamales it will link you to his web site.

Click photo for THE BEST TAMALE RECIPE YOU WILL FIND

Below is the documentation of our project.

Step 1-- Dec. 18, Purchase the Recipe

Setp 2-- Dec. 19 - Shopping for a steamer pot and ingredients at HEB (Local TX Grocery chain) is complete. Next I will prep the meat for cooking.

Step 3 - Dec. 20 - We boiled the meats, cooled a bit and seperated it as directed. We warmed some oil added the spices for the meat and mixed for 13 minutes. It looks just like the photo in the recipe but may be a bit less "red"...it is hard to tell. It tastes pretty good already. The broth is cooling and I will remove the grease from the top in the morning. Tomorrow is "tamale day" at our house.

Step 4 - Dec. 21 - Tamale Day

Having the meat ready we mixed the masa, soaked the husks and began to roll the tamales. Ours were going to be great because we used the broth from the pork and chicken to flavor the masa. We had some trouble figuring out the thickness of the masa on the husk, and exactly how to roll them but got better as we went along. Miguel came by after work and showed us some tips to make them more uniform and not too thick. We did two batches which made almost 10 dozen...as we had large pork butts and giant chickens to work with.

I must take a moment to say that the recipe from the link above produced some of the best tamales we have ever eaten. They were not greasy, not too hot and full of flavor. I did have trouble making sure the steamer pot did not run out of water but devised a way to look down into the pot and see the water level as our pot had no basket but a tray that fit into a slot near the bottom leaving space for about 10 cups of water to reside.

Bottom line is that we had a great time, produced some fine tamales for about $2.75/dozen and made them ourselves.

Paul, who hosts the recipe page above, was right...the best tamales in the world are those that are homemade and eaten right out of the steamer. Thanks Paul for a great recipe and a geat adventure which we will repeat often.

Jake (me) mixing masa by hand	Steamer being loaded with tamales
Lucy and Shari rolling the tamales	Finished Product