Making Tamales: Part One
Ah, it’s that time! Time to make tamales!
I had originally planned to try multiple recipes, but I only have time to try one recipe for this project. I chose a recipe from Isabel Eats, a first generation Mexican-American chef. Note: since I was just making tamales for my family of four, I adjusted the recipe for 18 tamales.
I chose this recipe to keep things consistent since I had chicken tamales at La Poblana and Juannita’s. Additionally, Isabel’s recipe was very detailed, which was very helpful considering this was my first time making tamales.
Anyway, to start making the tamales, the first thing I had to do was…grocery shopping! Shoutout to Pili’s Party Deli, our local Mexican grocery in Bloomington, because I am not sure I would have been able to find all of the ingredients without them. At Pili’s Party Deli, I bought masa flour and dried corn husks.
For the rest of the ingredients, I was able to find them at other grocery stores or already had them at home, so I proceeded to the first step of the recipe: soaking the corn husks.
The corn husks sat in a pot with hot water for an hour, so while they were soaking, I proceeded to make the salsa verde. First, I placed 2 poblanos, a serrano, 2 jalapeños, a garlic clove, and tomatillos on a baking tray and put them under the broiler for about ten minutes.
Unfortunately, the garlic got burnt, so I used an unroasted garlic clove for the next step, which was actually what the recipe called for, but I personally like my garlic roasted. However, I think it stayed under the broiler longer than a garlic clove can stand.
For the next step, I allowed the roasted vegetables to cool before peeling their skins off and throwing them into a blender. Along with the roasted vegetables, I added salt, water, chopped onion, and a fresh garlic clove.
After that had blended, I skipped a couple of steps in the original recipe, which calls for boneless skinless chicken thighs. My wonderful mom had made roasted chicken the night before, so I used that instead.
The next thing I did was I put some vegetable oil in a pan and then heated up my salsa verde mixture until it was boiling. At this point I added the cut up chicken to the sauce and allowed that to simmer while I prepared the masa dough.
For the masa dough, I added masa flour, salt and baking powder, and mixed that with my hands. Then, I added in vegetable oil and mixed that with my hands. All this point, the dough felt like wet sand, which is exactly how Isabel described it.
Then, to fully form the dough, I added in chicken broth until it felt like dry hummus as Isabel described.
Me kneading the dough 
The finished masa dough
The last thing I had to do before assembling the tamales was drying the corn husks that had been soaking in hot water.
And just like that, (not really, this process took about 3 hours), I was ready to assemble the tamales!
Check back for Making Tamales: Part Two where I assemble, steam, and finally, eat the tamales!
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