Hot Tamales

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I have never made tamales before but I am surprised how good these tamales taste like, they almost remind of some of the tamales I can get at the grocery freezer section but much better and less expensive.
I used some of the left over corn husks to tie the tamales individually instead of using butcher string to tie three together.

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I mixed things up and made the dough for AB's turkey tamales with the filling for these. These tamales are legit!

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I always read all the comments before making any recipe. I liked the one that suggusted using Masa Harina from Alton's Turkey Tamales recipe. I used 6 cups of Masa Harina which is a much finer corn meal with 1 cup of regular corn meal. I flavored the meal mixture with some of the seasonings from the recipe. Used all the broth ( I condensed it down to about 5 cups from the meat (I used beef brisket, since I bought one to make Guy's recipe. The corn dough tasted great on its own!

This is my first attempt at making tamales. Next time I will use more than just one tablespoon of meet. The corn husks I bought were pretty large.

I just took my first one out of the steamer, yes I steamed rather than boiled, Since it is my first I was afraid the water would get into my tamales. It tastes fantastic! I will definately be making these again, but with more meat in the middle.

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I've been making tamales for years, and after watching Alton's tamale episode, I knew it was time to whip up another batch. If you've never made tamales before, I can offer a few tips that will make the whole process easier.

First, don't make too big a deal out of cooking the meat?this is a perfect recipe for a slow cooker. Grab your big oval cooker, pick your meat, then throw the meat (you can use either pork or chicken and the seasonings in and let it cook away while you're at work. By the time you get home, it's falling-off-the-bone tender, your stock is perfect, and the shredding is easy.

Second, on dough day (aka assembly day, make it easy on yourself. Alton, I love you man, but 7 1/2 oz of lard? Big guy, just grab a one-pound box of lard, whack it in half and be done with it?trust me, tamal dough doesn't require that level of precision.

Now comes the fun part?assembling these little critters. Your best bet for evenly sized tamales is to use a cookie (portion scoop. The medium #40 size scoop (FoodNetwork carries the OXO brand makes the process very fast and easy. Coincidentally, by using the cookie scoop I get about 4 1/2 dozen tamales from a batch of dough.

Roll your own tamales and you'll never be happy with store-bought again.

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I made the recipe.. it was long but it turned out perfect. I have made tamales in the past and had to throw them away. Masa was too wet or to dry and the meat had no flavor.

Alton, Thanks for the great recipe!!!

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Um......hello is this thing on..... I'm sorry when I saw the above comments on tamale making being exhausting and time consuming, I couldn't help but comment. In my family this is a Thanksgiving and Christmas tradition that can be dated back to before I was born. The WHOLE family gets involved so for the novices out there if you aren't one ready for a little sweat in the kitchen or kitchen table for that matter, back away from this recipe or any of the others containing the word tamale. It can be messy, back breaking, and even aggravating at times... but when the family comes around that's all you want to do! Thanks again Alton for another lovely spin on a great classic staple! I step down from the soap box now. :

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I made this because I was sick of going out and getting tamales that weren't as authentic as my bestfriend who is latino use to make for me. So I made these and it was perfectly seasoned and spicy I added more chayanne pepper because I love hot food. These were excellent!!!

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Having never cooked tamales before I try to implement a big new thing like this in stages, realizing that I'm going to mess it up the first few times I do it. I want to develop a feel for the tamale cooking so I'm just going to do a few at a time, with the meat and broth stored in the fridge between experiments.

I found that, for me, the meat as it came out of the boil was perfectly seasoned, and when I added in the other half of the spices with the aromatics it was overwhelming -- not too hot but just too much of everything. I would have used maybe another tablespoon of the spice mixture at most.

Its possible that the intensity would have moderated some when the actual tamales were cooked but my experience has been that if the individual components aren't tasty the result won't be, so I'm redoing it with half the spices.

YMMV of course.

john

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Wow! That was a lot of work! I've never made tomales before. I did it all on my own. Next time I will call some friends! But the spices are great!

Instead of pork, I used about 6 chicken breasts. And I used a pressure cooker to cook the chicken which save you about an hour of cooking time. The spices for the chicken taste incredible! I used an extra jalapeno pepper with the onions and garlic.

I probably didn't portion out the cornmeal evenly between tomales when setting it up and I ended up running out of it and having to make another batch. But that was okay because I wanted to use up the lard.

I also noticed that I should have bought two packages of the corn husks because they come in very different sized and some were torn and others had holes in them.

Overall - this was fun - but man I'm tired!

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I once worked with a guy that sold them at work. He new someone that was trying to raise some money to go back to Mexico to see their mother who was sick. That was the first time I ever ate tamales and those were the best I have ever had until now. This recipe worked fine for me even simmering them in the broth 1 in from the top. I wasn't sure about the corn meal I had at home was the same so I bought some corn flour (masa at the mega mart near my house like Alton said too. I have had tamales a few times at different resturants but they were never as good as what my co-worker brought in. Now I can make the best tamales too. Thanks Alton!