Christmas Eve Tamales

Tamales are a Christmas Eve tradition in Mexican American families, which has been adopted by others living in the Southwest. Tamales are a big effort, so extended families or groups of friends get together to make these. We go to a tamale making party every few years where colleagues bring various tamale fillings, and you leave with a variety of tamales. But we always make our own tamales at home on Christmas Eve after our hike in the Superstition Mountains.

For us, tamale making starts with a visit about a week before Christmas to a large Mexican supermarket. The supermarket also makes and sells prepared foods, so we start our shopping with lunch. I get a torta, a Mexican sandwich, with either carnitas (pulled pork) or carne asada (steak). Alex gets tamales, and David gets chicken tacos. Chris mixes it up every year or just eats off of everyone else’s plates. Every year, someone complains about the food (“It was better last year.” “It is too spicy.” “I didn’t want the xxxx (fill in the blank)” “I heard they changed ownership.”) and about the long line for aqua fresca (fresh fruit drinks), but this is Tradition, so we go through it every year!

With tamales, you need to make peace with one thing: the masa (a corn-based mixture that is the basis of the tamale) is going to have either lard (if you buy prepared masa) in it or Crisco (if you make it yourself). We buy the fresh prepared masa with lard because it is fresh, easy, and makes the best tamales, and we only eat lard once a year! You can buy the dried masa in a package in the flour section of many grocery stores and make your own masa according to the directions on the package.

Most people are familiar with the corn husk wrappers that are used to wrap the tamale fillings. You soak these for a few hours in warm water or boiling water to make them pliable. The best are big corn husks because those are the easiest to use for wrapping. I will leave it to you to find the instructions on wrapping tamales on the web. Typically, you leave one end open, although with big corn husks, you can bring both ends together and tie in the middle. While certain of my kids want to use strips of corn husks to tie the wrappers, you can also use kitchen twine. You cut many lengths of twine ahead of time to tie the tamales. Often we distinguish among various fillings by how the tamales are tied.

In the Yucatan and more southerly parts of Mexico (as well as in parts of the Caribbean), banana leaves are used instead of corn husks. You can find these frozen in Asian groceries, but we buy ours fresh. I wash off both the fresh and the frozen ones. With the fresh ones, you cut out the central stem of the banana leaf and cut out generous sections of the leaf for tamale wrapping. This is the beauty of banana leaves – they are much easier to wrap than corn husks. They also impart a lovely flavor to the tamale, kind of a green vegetal flavor. You need to make the banana leaf sections pliable by heating them. Our flat top stove makes easy work of this, as Chris just passes the leaves over this briefly, and then they are pliable. You can do this with a gas stove and probably an electric stove as well. You spread the masa on your wrapper and then put filling in the center, not too much or you won’t be able to wrap the thing. The idea is to encase the filling with the masa thorough wrapping. Once you fill the banana leaf with masa and filling, you bring both ends into the center and tie them.

It is quite the production to be sure, although our family is used to Chinese dumpling production, which is the same thing in terms of producing vast quantities of food through family labor.

We make several filling each year, the recipes for two, Chicken Tinga and Black Beans, are in this cookbook. In addition to these, we have strips of Monterey Jack cheese (or any melting Mexican cheese), roasted hatch chiles (I buy these during hatch chile season in New Mexico, roast them on the barbeque, and freeze them. They are so easy to peel once frozen.) or strips of roasted and peeled poblano chiles, adobo sauce from the cans of chipotle in adobo, frozen, defrosted corn kernels, and whatever left over meat or cooked vegetables we have. We try to have carne asada (seasoned steak) before Christmas Eve so that we can chop leftovers for tamales. When I make Chicken Tinga, I will cook some chicken breast not in the spicy sauce for David, who is just getting used to spicy foods. Carnitas with red chile sauce is pretty traditional, but I can’t say that we have ever made this as a filling.

While wrapping and tying tamales, we throw several in the steamer to cook for one hour. While I covet tamale steamers, I cannot justify a pot that I might use once or twice a year. So we have improvised with vegetable steamer basket in a large stock pot with water in the bottom not touching the bottom of the steamer. I found by accident that my colander fit in my stock pot with the lid on. That makes a superb steamer. You always need to check carefully to see that the steamer has not run out of water. I add water at least once during the steaming

We serve the tamales with a variety of salsas and sauces, recipes in this cookbook. We stuff ourselves, and then freeze the rest of the tamales to be enjoyed in the months to come as easy dinners. You just steam them frozen. We tried freezing cooked tamales, but the results were not as good as the uncooked ones.

Marcia