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.
Because 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

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 Extra Big & Loud 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 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.

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 Extra Big & Loud 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!