Tamales

Over Christmas I went to my “Auntie” Racquel’s house to assist with her annual tamale making party!

Making tamales is an exceedingly time consuming project, especially with the volume of of tamales that were made at this party!

140 lbs of masa:

Racquel bought pre-mixed masa (thank goodness), but you still need to knead the masa in order to get it to the proper consistency before you can spread it onto the corn husks!  This is definitely a down and dirty, sticky job, as you can see :o)

You are supposed to be able to tell that the masa is ready by dropping a small piece into a glass of water; if it floats, it’s ready, if it sinks, you better keep working!

Racquel always said that getting the masa to float was an urban legend (something that she had never seen done and that she had never been able to do), but I was able to get it to float!  Let me tell you, it took a LOT of time and a LOT of kneading.

Here are just some of the corn husks waiting to be made into tamales!

Here is Raquel making the chile, don’t ask for the recipe because it is one of those add a little of this and a little of that recipes :o)

Also, it’s interesting to point out that there are not any tomatoes in that sauce, only chile!

To the chile, we add two whole shredded turkeys!

Every chile tamale gets one olive, my favorite part!

Along with the chile tamales, we make tamales filled with jack cheese & jalapenos.  These sound simple, but they taste SO good!

Here is my mommy spreading a thin layer of masa onto the soft side of the corn husk.  We all prefer a thin layer of masa :o)

The last tamale being made & filled!

Here is a big batch of of cheese tamales before they were steamed:

We have found that wrapping the tamales in paper helps them to stay more moist.

The steaming set up in the back yard:

Freshly steamed tamales!

Yummmmm, here is my cheese tamale:

Preparation of the chile (which involves deseeding and soaking pounds upon pounds of chiles) through the steaming of 500+ tamales takes approximately 24 hours (luckily I was not there for ALL of it!).

Some of the ingredients:

Hundreds of corn husks
2 turkeys
Pounds of chiles
Various seasonings
140 pounds of masa
Olives
18 pounds of jack cheese
Jalapenos
Good friends and alcohol to make the whole experience fun!

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