Team-building with tamales

Dale and I love tamales and usually buy them fresh at the farmer’s market. However, we’ve been talking about making them ourselves and finally decided to just do this thing.

I like to research everything to death, and Dale flies by the seat of his pants. I pulled out the Diana Kennedy cookbooks and read up on the historic art of tamale making. I studied masa from A to Z, while Dale played computer games and thought about tamales.

He surprised me by sharing he spotted all critical tools and ingredients at the local market I’ve been to once. When did he go? Is this what he does while I’m playing golf? Cruising the markets looking for who knows what?

We were ready to make our trek to the market, when I asked about filling. He unilaterally decided to make a pork filling he’d apparently unearthed on the Internet. I might have liked a vote, consulted with Diana and others, but it sounded good to me, and it was one less thing I had to worry about.

The market delivered as promised. They had pre-prepared masa, husks and even a tamale steamer, which we bought because none of the other 10,000 pots we have would work.

For the filling, Dale braised a pork butt in the oven with not much more than an onion. After it cooled, he shredded it and added his homemade chile sauce. That’s all there was to filling. But then I didn’t make it, and I know chile sauce is messy work involving the rehydration of dried pepper pods. I find it in our freezer already made!

We set up the work station. Dough, soaked husks, filling. We began to prep and realized neither one of us knew how to roll these things. The masa was too thick, so we added a bit of juice from the pork butt to thin it out.

As for rolling, we were in hysterics trying to figure it out. The first one Dale made looked like a monster burrito, and I weighed it just to see. The mother of all tamales weighed in at nine ounces. I wanted to name it El Hefe, but Dale insisted on El Capitan. I mean, wrap it in a pizza and it could be on the menu at Taco Bell.

They got smaller after that, but I never did understand the art of the roll. Dale was better at it than I was. They were looking like tamales, and we were argument-free, when we began to discuss steam time.

Dale’s sources, real or imagined, said 45 minutes. Diana (real) said two to three hours. That’s quite a discrepancy. We pulled out other cookbooks, and yes, it varied from 45 minutes to three hours.  How do you know?

We decided it probably depends on how many are in there and the thickness of the masa. The problem was I did not want to be starving at 8 p.m. waiting another hour because the masa wasn’t cooked.

I thought this would be the big fight, but we got through it without incident, probably because neither one of us was really sure about anything. It’s harder to pick a fight when you have no ground to stand on. We decided to make them early and then reheat when it was time for dinner.

The tamales took about two hours. They were probably too thick, and the rolling technique was inconsistent and weird. However, they were absolutely delicious! We had them two nights in a row and then froze the rest in their husks. A decadent treat we learned in Texas is tamales smothered in chili.

All in all, it was way fun. We laughed a lot because we were so outside our comfort zones. As retirement partners, I highly recommend taking on a joint project of some sort. Something where you have basic skills, but you are stretching them to new limits, so you learn together.

The whole experience reminded me of a team-building exercise from work, except you can use the f-bomb, and we got to kiss at the end.