Tamales

A few months ago I purchased a bag of Masa Harena --- not sure why though. This past week when Allison visited me I found a reason. Her first suggestion for what to cook with me was tamales. At first I was confused as to why she wanted to make a small red candy you buy in a box. However, after a little internet searching I remembered that they are, in fact, more than just candy.

We started to cook yesterday at about 5pm. The first step was to create a suitable vegetarian version of the Masa dough. Traditionally this is made with lard, but the local lard salesman was out of vegetable lard, so we needed to resort to a substitution of oil and a little butter. The recipes we looked at online suggested that it is best to use some chicken stock, but we wanted to use cheese in the filling (and my pots and pans are mostly dairy...) so we began looking for a suitable substitute. In the spirit of laziness, We didn't feel like going to the store to get vegetable stock, so after some poking around the cabinets we found a box of matzoh ball soup mix.

For the dough I used:
5 cups of Masa Harina
1 Tbsp baking powder
1 Tbsp salt
A few dashes of paprika, garlic powder and black pepper
1/2 a package of dried (vegetarian) chicken soup mix
4 cups or so of water
a little under 1 cup or so of oil (I used olive, but any kind probably does)



Mix together the dried goods. Slowly add in the water, making sure to mix with all of the masa. When all of the water is added, add in the oil and work with a fork until everything is mixed. The dough (perhaps not the best name for it, since its nothing like bread dough) should be a little grainy and fluffy and certainly not soupy.

After making the dough we needed to purchase some corn husks. I suppose that you can just save corn husks from summer corn purchases... but I didn't have any so we went to a local mexican food store and got few packages. To soften the husks we boiled some water and poured it over them and let them sit and soak for a few minutes.



Meanwhile we prepared a bean filling by sauteing a head of garlic and a large onion and then adding in a can of beans. It turns out that we probably should have doubled this part of the recipe since we ran out of the beans after making about half of the tamales.



Besides beans, we purchased three types of cheese (Queso Fresco, Mozzarella and cheddar) and some Jalapenos and green peppers for filling. We sliced the peppers into thin strips and tried not to get too many seeds from the Jalapenos into the tamales.





To assemble a tamale, place the corn husk on a flat surface with the pointy part facing away from you. Take the dough and place a small handful on the left closest section of the husk. With you fingers spread out the dough until its pretty thin and covers all but the right one-third and furthest one-third (near the pointy part) of the husk.




Now place some cheese and some pepper and some beans on the left-middle part of the dough. Taking the left side of the husk in your hand roll tightly over the filling and bring the left edge of the husk down to meet the end of right end of the dough.



This part reminds me a lot of rolling sushi... Then fold the pointy part in (towards you) and finish rolling the tamale towards the right. Finally take the tamale in hand and pinch off the top, open section (adding a little more dough if needed) so that you get a nice point of dough.



We used a vegetable steamer insert and a large pan to steam the tamales. I suppose anything which creates hot steam would do the job. The tamales really need to cook for a while, though they can be piled up a fair amount. As always, when steaming make sure not to run out of water, or else you will loss your pan. The key here is to let the cook for a while... at least 40 minutes or so.



The dough shouldn't be wet at all when the tamales are done. You should be able to slice the tamale (after unwrapping it) with a fork and it should keep its shape.




Our tamales came out really well. I think the recipe yielded about 30 or so, so we ended up freezing a good portion. If you freeze them I've read that you are not supposed to defrost them. Rather just steam them from frozen, or you can probably microwave them until hot.