Tamale's Another Day: A Tale of Failure and Redemption

I was scheduled to go to a small party Wednesday night, and I volunteered to make tamales. I'd made tamales once before, and it's a lot of work, but I had a plan to spread out the labor and felt reasonably confident.

The Filling

I chose to make the filling for my tamales from this recipe. Since I wanted some tamales for my freezer beyond what I needed for the party, so I decided to make four dozen. I'd need quite a bit of chicken, so I cooked it according to the "chicken and broth" method here. I cooked up five pounds of chicken breasts (well more than I'd have needed, but I wasn't sure how to estimate). After I removed the chicken from the cooking liquid, I made my firtst mistake, which was to forget about the liquid. I'd intended to use the reserved broth in making the dough, but I let it sit on the stovetop for way too long to be sure of safety.

Also that night, I shredded two ponds of cheese and roasted and over a dozen chiles for the filling and the salsa verse I intended to serve on the side. (Mistake #2 was not wearing gloves when working with the chiles -- poblanos and anaheims don't usually bother me, but that was a lot of pepper, and my hands were fairly uncomfortable when I went to bed.

Finally, I chopped the chiles and made the salsa verse, which I'll detail in a separate post.

The Husks

Tuesday night, I had to bus to a market a few miles from my apartment to get the dried husks for the tamales. After a wasted hour and a half upon my return, a quick web search taught me that the husks don't need to be unrolled from the little bundles they're sold in.

Masa and Disaster

My source for both the masa recipe and the overall procedure is Simply Mexican by Lourdes Castro, a book I really like. Though I'd made this recipe successfully before, doubling the amount proved to be the death of my cheap hand mixer. This might have been okay, since I'd worked it for nearly long enough anyway, but then I killed the thing by misreading the recipe and adding triple the amount of baking powder.  (I steamed a little of the dough, to see if I could use it anyway, but it tasted really salty.)

I thought about restarting the dough, but I was tired and had rattled nerves and just couldn't face it. Nor could I summon enthusiasm for the alternatives I could think of. Finally, in a stroke of culinary genius, I walked to a local restaurant and BOUGHT two dozen tamales. (No, I didn't tell people at the party that I'd made them.)

Redemption Casserole

This afternoon, I summoned nerve to do something with all that filling I'd made. I had put the mix in a casserole dish, and I topped it with the cornmeal mix from this recipe and shoved it in a 350 degree oven for half an hour. It was pretty good. It wasn't really redemption, put it was pretty good.


I'd love to be able to say that I'd drawn big lessons from this experience, but I really didn't. Stuff is going to happen, and I'm going to make mistakes. Though I was temporarily shaken, I think I'll recover quickly and try again soon.

After all, there's always tamale.