Hello and welcome back to The Stone Soup Cook–I’m so glad you’re here!
This week is the final week of Advent: the week of joy. Today, as I continue my observance of Advent through a celebration of foods from around the world, I’m going to walk you through making tamales, a quintessentially holiday food for many families, and a traditional food of Mexico.
Tamales have been around for a long time. And when I say they’ve been around for a long time, I mean a REALLY long time. There are hieroglyphs dating back as many as 10,000 years that depict the art of making tamales. Tamales have always been a sacred food, being consumed during holidays and for special celebrations. Also, because they are portable, they were sent along with hunters to provide food for long hunting trips.
Families everywhere enjoy tamales at Christmas and at New Year’s celebrations. Tamales are traditionally associated with the Mexican culture, and I most closely associate tamales with the days long ritual of families making tamales together. And that’s probably why tamales became associated with Christmas–families getting together at Christmas and making the tamales–bundles and bushels of tamales. Many of the recipes I found when doing my research for this article were recipes for making a hundred or more tamales.
I decided to make tamales by myself in order to absorb the process and to be able to give you a good, hands-on tutorial. My experience took a couple of days. I’m sure you could do it by yourself in a day, but I’m not sure I would try, unless you are an experienced tamale-maker.
Here are some immediate take-aways: when I make them in the future, I will use my stand mixer to make the tamale dough; I will plan ahead; tamales are NOT for the faint of heart because lard makes the best masa; there are lots of good choices for filling: pork, beef, chicken and corn to name a few; tamales are good for breakfast, lunch and dinner; and finally, they are, without a doubt, delicious.
I started by making the meat the day before I made the tamales. I decided to use beef short rib meat and went to my old stand-by: braised short ribs.
This was a good choice–the meat was tender and already flavorful, so only a few spices were necessary to create a good, appropriately flavored meat filling for the tamales.
There are lots of choices for what to serve alongside your tamales. I decided on chili. And here’s where I got pretty lucky: The weather was cold and blustery the week before Christmas and I had made a pot of Keri’s Killer Beans the day before I made the beef short ribs.
Hence, I had everything I needed to whip up a pot of chili to go with my tamales without really planning for it. But–this turned my tamale day into a tamale and chili day. It was doable, but a LOT of cooking for one day.
Like I said earlier, most of the recipes I found made, like 100 tamales. I only wanted about a dozen of them, maybe a few more, but decidedly not 100, so I looked for recipes for smaller quantities and cobbled this recipe together and cut it in half. This worked just fine, but I made quite a mess trying to make the dough using my hand mixer. So, another lesson learned: use the big stand mixer for this job. I’m still finding little dough globs on my counter!
With that, I now invite you to take a look at the recipe I came up with for beef tamales:
Thank you for checking in here at The Stone Soup Cook. I have thoroughly enjoyed sharing Advent meditations and food from around the world with you for the last few weeks! I hope you have found time during this busy season to find peace, joy, love and happiness in your lives.
I wish you a very happy new year and I look forward to 2024 with breathless anticipation for another great year here at The Stone Soup Cook.
See you in 2024–until then,
Peace, love and good food,
Keri
