things wot i made then ate: tamales

Tamales can be anything; beef, chicken, pork, lamb, ostrich, iguana, howler monkey, prairie dog. Okay, maybe not so much those last four. All the tamales I made previously were chicken, and these initially were going to be chicken too but I changed that idea when I opened the freezer and saw a gigantic pork roast sitting there on the bottom, all forlorn and neglected. I thought the roast had a bone in it, and I wish it did have one because that could have contributed mightily to the flavor of the broth. Alas, no bone. It must have been one of those fancy-pants up town roasts. Whatever, it worked.

My largest pot is too small so the meat was seared in two batches. This is half.

Water is added plus a bunch of Mexican type spices. Mexican oregano, whole cumin seed, whole coriander seed, whole black peppercorn, bay leaf, sea salt. I held back with the intention of tasting later and supplementing if necessary but additions were not necessary. See? Now that there is what you call maturity! I no longer go dumping everything I think will work until at last I succeed in totally overdoing it.

These are all old chiles I had in a box. The red ones are marked "hot" but they are so old I suspect some of their intensity is lost to the atmosphere. There are five different types, all with different flavors and heat intensities. They were not tortured in a skillet as usual to activate their oils but rather just dumped into the water to cook with the pork for hours, along with an onion, quartered, and three large cloves of garlic, smashed to activate its sulfides. I also added a small bag of sun-dried tomatoes. Seeds rattling around everywhere. That explains why there are so many chiles around here, there are seeds all over the place. I can't get rid of them all. I think Mexican people just give up and leave a lot of the seed in there. It's making me neurotic.

The pork is cooked in seasoned water with chiles for hours. The liquid is allowed to cool with the pork still in it. If the pork is removed while still hot, it tends to dry out. So it cools in the liquid and is then pulled apart. This exposes more surface area, and the fibers act as mop that absorbs more liquid than it could otherwise hold.

The liquid is processed separately into a smooth sauce. The sauce is taste-tested to see if it needs correction. It was different than I expected, and I did expect to adjust with more chiles in powder and flake forms, but I decided I did like the flavor a lot. It is mild and sweet and with lovely and appealing expanded chile dimensions, but virtually no heat. It would appeal to anybody, I think, even children. I do not understand where this chile sweetness comes from. I did not add any sweetener.

Processed liquid is added back to the pork, as much as it will take. I want the tamales to be moist.

It is unusual to roll tamales with strips of chiles, but that is what I am doing with this batch. I could have just as easily bought a can of diced chiles and added them directly to the pulled pork, but I wanted each tamale to have a strip of chile as a surprise. These are mild.

Masa harina is same thing that corn tortillas are made of. It is corn meal treated with an alkali. This treatment that the corn undergoes with slacked lime (the chemical, not the fruit) loosens the outer husk of the corn and softens the interior making niacin available along with contributing calcium. Masa harina is a fine powder that readily re-mixes with water or any other liquid, here, some of the pork sauce, and water, along with butter because I didn't have any lard. Yes, LARD. I would have used it if I had any, and I thought I did. I was unwilling to go back to the store just to get lard, but it is an authentic ingredient. Can you imagine -- butter substituting for lard?

I saw Bobby Flay make these, or something like them, on Iron Chefs, using regular corn meal. At that moment I thought, "Oh, no. That's 100% wrong." The judge, Jeffrey Steingarten, bless him, picked up on it too and questioned Flay incredulously. Flay bullshitted his way through the questioning like a badass know-it-all, "Yeah, they use some kind of mix, but sometimes I like to use regular corn meal for its flavor." but it was clear he did not fully appreciate the joy and superiority of Masa harina and its contribution to Latin cuisine, much less its nutritional value compared to ordinary corn meal. Further, the process of treating grain with alkali is called nixtamalization, thus tamal, so wrapping a corn husk around a filling smothered in corn meal does not make a tamal without the nixtamalization. It would be simply polentization, or more prosaically, gritsifcation. Man, something is wrong with this spellcheck thing, it's suddenly putting red lines under everything.

This masa (dough) is pink because the pork sauce added to it is red.

Corn husks can be found at any grocery store here in the West and the Southwest. If you cannot find them, you can probably use banana leaves, but it will not be the same, and that's a shame. Some pages online say to soak the husks overnight. That is probably a good idea. I soaked mine for a few hours. They are always a little stiff. They are also irregular. Some work better for wrapping than others.

Hahaha, concha ↑ means shell.

There is nothing worse than a tamale that's all masa. Wet masa in this application equates to a wet tortilla. You wouldn't serve a tablespoon of filling on three corn tortillas, so the same idea applies with tamales. A very thin layer is applied to the wet husk.

Surprise! Chile. Now, who wouldn't be filled with glee and wonder to find a chile tucked inside their tamale? Nobody, that's who.

Most tamale cooks fold their tamales and leave one end open. I must admit that is an attractive idea. But I will be freezing most of these so they must be closed. At least I think they must be closed. So mine get tied with a strip of husk. Very Asian looking, don't you think?