Hot Tamale! - A new southwest dish and flavor

Today I decided to take advantage of the rainy weather to spend the day inside cooking.  With an entire day to cook, I figured there were a lot of different things that I could try, which meant there were a lot of things to write about.  Everything from sauces, to vegetables to actually cooking lamb which I don't do often.  But, I decided instead to write about the starch item of our dinner because it was more interesting.  Today, I attempted to make tamales!

When I had that first meal at Mesa Grill, I found the tamale just as interesting and delicious as the pork itself.  It was one of the southwest flavors that was brand new to me.  Then when I had the opportunity to dine at Frontera Grill, I again had a tamale, and again was blown away.  Now, I figured it was time to give it a try myself.  So, I pulled out the Mesa Grill cookbook and flipped to the tamale section.  Out of the various options available, I thought I would go with the sweet potato tamales with pecan butter.  

Turns out that tamales are pretty labor intensive and time consuming.  Just looking at the recipe I realized that it would take a minimum of 3 hours.  For starters, you have to take corn husks clean them and soak for at least two hours.  Then there is the roasting of the sweet potato and plantains, two ingredients that I don't work with a lot.  The sweet potato roasts for about an hour, and you throw the plantain in for the last fifteen minutes.  Then throw the sweet potato, plantain, some maple syrup, cinnamon, butter and cream in a food processor (sounds delicious already doesn't it)?  I could stop here, put the puree into a pan, cook it, and have incredibly delicious sweet potatoes...in fact, I might have to break this out for Thanksgiving.  

But, it keeps going.  After creating the puree, you put it in a blender with corn, onion, more maple syrup, and more cinnamon, and then blend until it is nice a smooth.  Then you add a bit of corn meal and create a nice, sweet potato flavored masa.  Up to this point, everything has actually been pretty easy.  A lot of roasting, blending and pureeing.  Now, the tamale prep gets a little tricky.  According to the recipe, I'm supposed to put a bunch of the tamale mixture into two corn husks that are overlapping.  Then you fold the tamales over and tie the ends.  Sounds easy, right?  It wasn't.  The first time I tried, I tied them, and then went to pick it up, and they slid apart spilling the filling.  And it's not like I can start over because the husks have to soak for over 2 hours.  So I cleaned everything up and tried again, trying to make sure that when I tied the tamales, they wouldn't slide apart.  It took about a half dozen tries and about 15 minutes, I managed to get three tamales pseudo-tied.  

After that, it's a matter of cooking them.  You put them in a steamer, and steam for over an hour.  In theory they stay together and then you take them out and open them.  In actuality, at about an hour, they had kind of opened themselves, and weren't fully cooked, so I left them on longer while I finished everything else.  The one problem is that I forgot to check the water.  I started to notice a faint burning smell and realized that there was no water left in the pot.  Note to readers, when steaming something, especially for a longer period of time, be sure to check the water level every now and then so you don't burn the bottom of the pot.

Anyway, I pulled the tamales out, added a little bit of the pecan butter that I had made earlier in the day, and served them with lamb chops with an orange/passion fruit sauce, chicken (I didn't but enough lamb...) and a roasted asparagus.  The flavor profiles were a little all over the place reaching from Italian vegetables to a Southwestern tamale, to a protein with a flavor that was pretty unique. But, in a way it all worked and came together as a delicious.  The flavor of the tamales was quite excellent.  They stayed moist, thanks to cooking by steaming.  And, I got the ok to try them again.

This was a fun dish because it allowed me to cook something that I've never done before, and present a flavor that I hadn't done before.  It was a lot of work, and there were a few mistakes along the way, but all in all, isn't that what learning to cook is all about.  Next time I'm going to figure out the trick to wrapping tamales.  I think I'll have to break out the Rick Bayless cookbook because I seem to remember an instructional guide...