Few, if any, foods are better at conveying love than the tamale. You don’t just whip a batch of them together for people you don’t care about—why would you go through all that effort? No, if someone gives you a tamal, they care about you. 3Because of the effort it takes to make them, they are centerpieces for important holidays and celebrations.
If you’re keen on having a holiday Tamalada, we’re happy to help! We have tools to help you on your tamale journey, and a tasty recipe to try them out with. Let’s get cooking!
About tamales
Tamales are an ancient dish originating in Mexico. The corn for tamales, like that for tortillas, is nixtamalized—it has undergone a process of cooking and soaking in a highly alkaline solution. The nixtamalization of corn makes the B-vitamins in it bio-available, which is what allows people to use corn as the basis of their diet without suffering from pellagra or other mal-nutritive diseases. Plus it changes the flavor of the corn from plain old starchy corn to something aromatic, almost floral, and delicious.
The resultant masa is ground somewhat coarsely, mixed with fat and liquid, filled, wrapped, and steamed. The wrapping varies by region, with corn husks prevalent in the north and banana leaves taking over more in the south of Mexico.
Now, the author of this blog post is not of Mexican ancestry, and we don’t claim that the recipe we’re presenting here is the “most authentic” or that it represents a culinary culture. But whether you’re striving to recreate a perfect Aztec ur-recipe, or experiment with your own non-traditional ingredients (smoked brisket tamales, anyone?), the tools you need remain the same, and that’s what we’re here to talk about.
Making the best tamales
What makes a good tamale—besides love? You need a masa that is not dry and crumbly, making you sip after every bite. But the masa should be set, not mushy or runny. It should also be light, not heavy and dense. And of course, you need a delicious filling.
Making light masa
For masa that is not dense, you need to use enough lard and enough air. We like to use freshly rendered pork lard, available at many Mexican markets or butcher shops where it is the byproduct of making fresh chicharrones. This lard is a little softer, a little more brown, and a whole lot more flavorful than the bricks of lard you buy in a box. But regardless of what fat you use, you need a good deal of it, and it needs to be well whipped into the dough. While the cooks of the past didn’t have stand mixers, we do now, and you should use one! Making the dough in a stand mixer is fast, although it will still take a minute to get enough air whipped into the batter for a light end product.
It’s impossible to escape the instruction (at least in English-language recipes) to try to float a little of the raw dough in a cup of water to check for lightness. If it won’t float, whip it more, or add more lard. Though we’ve also had loads of tamales made with masa that sunk, slowly, that were delicious and completely satisfactory.
Cooking time for tamales
How long does it take to cook tamales?
For a small batch like this, it takes about 1 hour to cook them.
Even a light dough won’t save a tamal from being undercooked or dry and crumbly, so cooking them long enough is important. You may see recipes that call for multiple hours of steaming, but those recipes are often for a LARGE steamer basket full of these gems. Yes, if you’ve packed a hundred tamales into a steamer, it will take a long time to cook, but if you’re only making enough for a small gathering, an hour of steam will suffice.
Use a good timer like that you can hear from far away to measure the time of your cook. Overcooking them isn’t a huge problem, but you want to eat them as soon as you can!
Does temperature matter for cooking tamales?
Temperature does have an effect on how the starches in the masa gelatinize. Full gelatinization, without any crumbliness left over, is what we want, so it seems that it should matter, but with the cooking time we’re looking at, we should have no problem hitting those key temperatures. But because we think a lot about thermal principles here, it may be interesting for you to learn. One study 4 showed that peak gelatinization of corn flour occurred between about 158 and 168°F (70 and 76°C), but that the gelatinization temperature was dependent on hydration as well. More hydrated flour samples gelled at lower temperatures.
What we take away from this is that you need to make sure you use enough liquid in your masa, and it can be nice (though not strictly necessary) to temp your tamales. We used a Thermapen® ONE during our cook and found that we were in the peak zone for some time. (The tamales suck up more heat during gelatinization, causing the temperature rise to slow.)
Not that in this recipe we use dried tamale masa—masa harina para tamales. It is more coarse than dried masa for tortillas, which is part of the reason it takes an hour to steam. Finer-ground flour gels more quickly, but the coarser flour is important for tamal texture. You can, of course, use fresh masa if you have access to a tortilleria nearby that makes it locally.
Filling tamales
Tamales can be filled with just about anything. Play with the flavors if you like, and try new things, but precook your filling, especially if it is meat. Ours were filled with a shreddy pork filling in a green chili sauce. They can be made well ahead of time and refrigerated before you make the tamales, or made right before you cook. But either way, it doesn’t take much filling to fill a tamale. A tablespoon or two will usually suffice. It is, after all, the corn that we’re about here; the filling is just used to season it.
Everyone loves tamales, and if they don’t, maybe you should make them one with your love that they’ll love. Use a loud timer like to monitor the time, and get your Thermapen ONE out to make sure you’ve made it past the major gelatinization point. Then the filling is up to you. These are a process, to be sure, but they’re well worth the effort for your celebration. Happy cooking!
Homemade Tamales: Hot, Delicious, Properly Cooked
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- Author: Martin
Description
Homemade green chili pork tamales, adapted from Daina Kennedy, with input from SeriousEats.com
Makes about 24 small tamales.
Ingredients
For the dough:
- 1/2 lb pork lard
- 1 tsp kosher salt
- 1 lb masa harina para tamales
- 2 1/2 C chicken broth
- 1/2 tsp baking powder
- Corn husk wrappers (or banana leaf, if you prefer)
For the filling:
- 2 lb cubed pork, shoulder or sirloin (or some pre-made carnitas)
- 2 poblano chilies
- 2 jalapeños
- 1 medium onion, skinned and quartered
- 8 medium tomatillos, husks removed
- 1 bunch cilantro
- 4 cloves garlic, peeled
- Juice of 1 lime
- 1/2 tsp whole cumin seed
- 1 large pinch hoja santa (a dried herb available at Mexican markets—omit if you can’t get it)
- Salt to taste
Instructions
Make the filling:
- Roast the fresh chilies and the tomatillos (husked) under a broiler until charred. While the chilies and tomatillos roast, sear the pork in a hot pan with a little oil to brown it.
- Put the chilies in a bowl, covered, for a few minutes to soften the skins further. Remove the skins under running water. Deseed the chilies.
- Place the chilies, tomatillos, cilantro, garlic cloves, the onion, the juice of the lime, cumin, and the hoja santa in the jar of a good blender. Blend until smoothish. Taste for salt and add some, but under-salt it—it will concentrate during cooking.
- Pour the green sauce over the pork in the pan and bring to a boil. Simmer until the meat is very tender and shreddable, about 60–90 minutes. If the sauce gets too dry, add water to compensate and keep cooking.
- For a shortcut: if you have some leftover pulled pork or some carnitas, add them to the sauce and cook until the sauce no longer tastes “raw” instead of cooking fresh pork until it falls apart.
- Shred the pork in the sauce and test for salt one more time. Now is the time to salt correctly.
- While the pork filling is cooking, soak the corn husk wrappers in plenty of very hot water. Shred one or two of the husks along the grain to make long, thin strips you can use as ties.
Make the masa for the tamales:
- In a stand mixer, combine the masa harina, salt, and baking powder. Add the rendered lard and mix.
- Add the chicken stock and continue to mix, whipping to a light consistency.
- Check a pinch of the dough to see if it rises and floats in a cup of water. If not, keep whipping. If even that doesn’t help, add a little more lard.
- When the masa is ready, start making the tamales.
Fill and steam the tamales:
- Remove a husk from the hot water, let it drip off.
- Spoon a couple tablespoons of masa onto the husk, centered about 2 inches from the wide end of the husk, in the center of the width. Smooth it out into a rectangle that ends 1/2–1 inch from the edge of the base of the husk triangle. Do not spread all the way to the edges.
- Spoon about 1 tablespoon of pork filling onto the filling. Fold the right side, then the left side of the husk over the filling. Fold the tip of the triangle husk over and tie it in place with one of the husk strips you made earlier.
- Set that tamal aside in a stockpot steamer basket. Make the rest of the tamales.
- Once they’ve all been made and stowed in the steamer basket, heat the water in your steamer pot to a boil.
- Set the basket of tamales in the steamer and cook. Set your timer for 1 hour.
- Starting after about 30 minutes, check the internal temperature with your Thermapen ONE just to be sure they’re passing the 158–168°F (70–76°C) mark. (This shouldn’t be an issue, but if you double or triple the batch, it might be!)
- When the timer sounds, remove the basket of tamales, transfer them carefully to a serving platter, and serve, with love, to your adoring family and friends.
Notes
There are many ways to fill tamales. Some use two husks each, some use one, some tie them, some don’t—the important thing is to get them wrapped. Follow the instructions for wrapping that suit you best.
Shop now for products used in this post:
Thermapen ONE, true instant-read thermometer
Hi-temp silicone spatula
