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.

La Hacienda

Greetings! We'll be posting our experiences in and around Indianapolis and across Indiana. We love food and the countryside.

I figured that Sunday May 24 would be a good day to go to the Indianapolis Zoo since many people would be at the Indy 500. This was our first time going to the zoo despite the fact that we've lived here over 10 years. We got there at 9am, and there were maybe 50 cars in the parking lot.

We loved the zoo. I'll post some pics on that part of the day soon.

On the way back we stopped at La Hacienda at 68th and Binford Blvd. We found out about this place from the Indy Restaurant Scene blog.

We stopped there because we recently took our first shot at making homemade tamales. I'll post those pics soon, too. We really enjoyed them, but we wanted to get a comparison with real tamales.

We loved it. The food was served fast, and mega hot. The prices were right. We'd recommend it.

I had #14, a tamale and two enchiladas. Anita had #5 with a tamale. The #5 was rice and beans and cheese and beef enchiladas. Anita also ordered a Texas marg. We also had guacamole with the chips and salsa they brought when we sat down.

Anita really liked the margarita, and everything else she ordered. She'd have had another marg had it not been noon. I loved everything I had too.

The food was great. As the blog link above mentions, the guac was good, but not the usual thick style. Still, tasty. For about $34 (including tip) we crawled out of the place, full and happy.

BTW, our tamales were actually better, sorta. We slow cooked a boston butt all day for our tamales. Ours had a little better taste, but we didn't use as much masa, so ours were smaller. I'll post the recipe and pics of our attempt soon.