Tamales

This was our first attempt at making homemade tamales. We used the recipes below:

Traditional Tamales
Red Chili sauce for Traditional Tamales

We started out by roasting some dried New Mexico chiles.

Meanwhile, we got the 3 1/2 pound butt going on the stovetop. The butt cooked in some onion, salt, and garlic for about 3 hours.

The chiles then went into hot water for 30 minutes. We took the chiles and some of the water and pureed that to make the red sauce.



We then got the corn husks soaking. We bought 2 packages of large husks at Meijer. Next time we'll go to the local Mexican bodega to buy them as we ended up with a lot of little husks we could not use. The ideal size seems to be about 6" x 8".



Anita then began spreading the masa onto the husks. The recipe said use 2 Ts per husk. In hindsight (and comparing to the tamales we bought at La Hacienda), we think we should use 1/2 cup or more instead as we saw in another tamale recipe.




We then spooned in some of the meat mixture (the pulled pork and the red sauce) and rolled up the tamales.



We layered the tamales in the bamboo steamer Anita gave me for my birthday. We could do about 20 or so at a time. There are steamers you can buy where you stand the tamales on end. You can probably do a lot more of them at a time that way.


The tamales steamed for about 2 hours. The recipe link above says 40 minutes. They were nowhere near done by then. We opened one up and checked it and the masa was not set until about 2 hours.


We served them with rice and chorizo refried beans. We topped the tamales with rooster sauce (aka Sriracha).

Next time we'll use more masa in each husk and also make some salsa verde to top the tamales with at the end. All in all, we were very pleased with our first attempt. We ended up with about 60 tamales. We used the vacuum sealer to freeze about 30 of them for the next rainy night when I can't grill.