Slowly Making Tamales etc. Part V

I’m fortunate enough to be renting a house with several banana palms in the back yard, so finding banana leaves was a lot easier than finding corn husks. No one in northern Mexico or the U.S. would use anything but corn to wrap their tamales, but please don’t try to pull the authenticity card on me – in tropical Latinoamerica, places like Guatemala and Peru, they wrap their tamales with banana leaves. I’ve eaten hundreds of things that have been steamed or grilled in banana leaves, but until now I’ve never personally tried to cook with them.

If you don't have a banana tree, the local markets will sell you a packet of leaves for almost nothing. You can also find ears of corn at the markets, but having grown up eating perfectly ripe sweet corn picked the same day, I find the stuff available here to be overripe and starchy. In other words, I'm not gonna buy a bunch of corn just to use the husk and throw the rest away. Banana leaf it will be....

Monday. First I went to the back garden, grabbed the machete, and with a few clumsy left-handed chops took down the two largest and cleanest-looking leaves from the tallest tree. Then I used a paring knife to strip the leafy parts away from the central stalk. The trickiest part was that while cutting against the grain the leaves want to split parallel with the fibers, so you have to watch out or you’ll end up with thin strips instead of wider sheets. I cut away any brown spots and washed off the cocoons and dried gecko poop. After wiping down the leaves with a clean cloth, I carefully folded the leaves and placed them in a metal steamer for several minutes. This made them more pliable and less likely to tear while handling them.

Next I made the picadillo for stuffing and then the tamale dough (recipes forthcoming).

I’m happy to run my mouth as if I were an expert on any number of subjects, but making tamale dough ain’t one of them. Instead, I’ll refer you to what looks like a great recipe: http://www.fronterakitchens.com/cooking/recipes/recipe_porktamales.html; as far as it goes for gringos cooking Mexican food, I can’t think of anyone more credible than Rick Bayless. I ended up with 2/3 C of lard, so I was shooting for a half recipe. Then I discovered a different and more straightforward recipe on the side of the masa harina bag, which is the one I ended up using.

With fingers like sausages, my strong suit isn’t stuffing and rolling things like dumplings and tamales, so they always turn out looking pretty rough. In the trade, the euphemism used for inexpertly shaped food is “rustic.” As I progressed with stuffing my rustic tamales, I experimented with different techniques for rolling – with the grain of the leaf, against the grain, using various amounts of filling – but I never seized on a single best approach. Could be I was too hungry to think straight.

I steamed two panfuls of tamales. The first batch I rolled without tying off the ends, so the tamales turned out a bit too soft and wet. For the next batch I used thin strings torn from leftover banana leaves to secure the ends. As I had hoped, this second batch turned out moist and light and fluffy. Despite the dark color of the lard, the dough tasted rich and savory without overpowering the whole. The complex seasoning of the stuffing still shined through the hearty flavor of the dough, but in the future I will season the stuffing even more aggressively.

Because I was so damned hungry and because the steamer was pumping out such a great smell, I ate five or six of the tamales without bothering to make the beans ’n’ rice that would comprise the next day’s feast.