Sweet Tamales and Champurrado

Tamales are probably my favourite ever Mexican dish.

Like chiles rellenos, they take forever to make. But they are totally worth it.

Tamales (the singular is tamal) are dumplings made of corn dough (masa) and steamed in a corn husk or a banana leaf.

They are usually filled with something delicious and, especially in restaurants in the United States, can be accompanied by a sauce.

The filling can be savoury or sweet, and they can also have no filling at all. These are called tamales sordos, which means "deaf tamales".

Deaf tamales are the classic accompaniment to mole.

In Mexico you can buy tamal dough (masa para tamales), which is like tortilla dough but more coarsely ground. Here in the UK you have to improvise using masa harina.

I first made tamales from the recipe in Two Cooks and a Suitcase, and this is still the recipe I trust most.

Before this post, I had made tamales twice and "tamale pie" twice, going savoury each time, but I really wanted to give sweet tamales a try for two reasons:

• I could have tamales for breakfast

• I could eat them with champurrado (more on that below)

Tamales are at least a two-day affair.

The day before you plan to eat them, put all you corn husks in cold water to soak. Weigh them down with a plate so each one is completely submerged.

You can buy corn husks, masa harina, and everything else you need for tamales at Lupe Pinto's or from the Cool Chile Company, by the way.

Then you need to decide on a filling and make it. For the sweet tamales I just used dried cranberries, so I got to skip this step.

On the day you plan to serve, you need to mix up your tamal dough. This is a combination of masa harina, melted fat, liquid, and a half teaspoon of baking powder to keep the tamales light.

For savoury tamales, you might use melted lard (or butter), and the liquid would be a stock of since kind.

Two Cooks and a Suitcase only gives a recipe for savoury tamal dough, so I had to improvise a sweet version.

I used melted butter for the fat and dissolved a cone of real Mexican piloncillo in some warm water in place of stock.  

Sweet tamal dough

Ingredientes

• 200 g masa harina
• 100 g melted butter
• 250 ml water
• 1 small cone of piloncillo (about one ounce)
• 1/2 tsp baking powder

Preparación 

Put the water into a pan over a very low heat and add the piloncillo. You might want to bash it up in a mortar first so it dissolves more quickly.

Or you could substitute a little less than an ounce of demerara sugar, brown sugar, or caster sugar mixed with molasses.

Also, they sell cones of unrefined sugar in many Jamaican/Caribbean food shops. This is very similar to piloncillo.

Sift the dry ingredients into a mixing bowl.

Add the melted butter and water (once the piloncillo has dissolved) and mix into a batter. Two Cooks likens this to cake batter, but I find it's much stiffer and less pourable than that.

This is stuff you can scoop up with a spoon and spread with a knife.

Which is basically what you have to do next.

Spread a corn husk on a plate, wide side facing away from you.

Take a tablespoon or so of the dough and spread it over the husk in a square-ish shape like this:

Put a spoonful of you filling on the dough (how much filling depends on how big your tamales are).

Fold them up so that the filing is completely enclosed by the dough and the dough is completely enclosed by the husk.

You will find some husks have holes or rips or are otherwise unusable. Tear these ones into thin strips. They tear easily along the grain.

Use these strips to tie up the tamales into little parcels.

Traditionally you leave the wide end of the husks open, but I usually tie them at both ends if I can. Don't ask me why. It's just the way my mother taught me. Presumably she learned it from her grandmother.

Once all your tamales are wrapped, place them in a steamer, wide side facing up (especially if it's open at that side).

Put the lid on the steamer (not pictured).

These need to steam for an hour, 45 minutes of which has to be on full steam. So while you're waiting, make some champurrado.

Champurrado is atole flavoured with chocolate.

Atole is a traditional Mexican hot drink thickened with masa. It is the classic drink to have with tamales.

I stole this champurrado recipe from Rick Bayless so the measurements are in American.  

Champurrado 

Ingredientes

• 1/2 cup masa 
• 2 cups milk 
• 3 ounces Mexican chocolate 
• 2 ounces piloncillo 
• Some aniseed (I used a star anise) 

Preparación

If you live in Britain, you have to make your own masa.

Mix 1/2 cup masa harina with 1/4 cup hand-hot water and you're done. No resting or kneading like when you make tortillas.

Put the milk in a pan and add the masa. Stir it up. Little darlin'. Stir it up.

Next add the piloncillo. About two small cones will do, but weigh them first to make sure.

You'll also need to chop or grind them up so they dissolve better.

Two cones of piloncillo waiting to get bashed to fuck.

Then add the chocolate. I used half a block of Willy's Cacao, ground up with 20 g of toasted almonds and a 5 mm cinnamon stick.

Pop in your aniseed, if you're using it, and bring the whole thing to a simmer, whisking whisking frequently.

When the chocolate and piloncillo have dissolved and the champurrado is nice and thick, it's done. It will look like this:

By the way, the longer you cook it, the thicker it gets. Eventually you will be eating chocolate porridge.

Now your tamales should be done. Remove them to a serving plate so people can help themselves.

A pile of sweet tamales.

Ladle some champurrado into mugs and serve.

The champurrado was so thick we often dipped our tamales into it, sort of like chcolate con churros.

But the tamales were so fecking delicious they didn't really need any accompaniment. The cranberries had gone all plump and moist, and the sweetened tamal dough was delicious even before it was cooked.

An unwrapped tamal. Don't eat the corn husk, whatever you do.

I had been nervous about the tamales, because a friend of mine had recently made them and reported that they fell apart, even though she used the same recipe.

I did some research and found this is one of the ways tamales often go wrong. Another is that the dough is too dense and stodgy.

My friend is an excellent cook, better than me, in fact. So now I was really worried.

But once again, my tamales were perfect. Having now made tamales or a variation of them five times, I can report that they have never gone wrong for me.

I have no idea why. It ain't pure talent, I can tell you. And it ain't because tamales are easy to make (they aren't). It must be luck. Or maybe the spirit of my great grandmother Eva guiding me or something.

If you have a half-Mexican great grandmother, you should really try this; in fact, even if you don't you should. Tamales are one of the culinary wonders of the world.

Hell, if you're afraid of all the work. I'll come over and make them for you. One of my New Year's Resolutions is to make more tamales.

As for the champurrado, it was absolutely delicious. The only thing is, it tasted a helluva lot like Mexican hot chocolate, which is much easier to make.

Therefore I doubt I will make champurrado again. In the very near future I will make a more basic atole to see if I like it (starting with a variation probably wasn't the best introduction to this drink, but I found the concept of masa-thickened hot chocolate impossible to resist).

Once again, you can get everything you need to make tamales from Lupe Pinto's or the Cool Chile Company (if you don't live in Edinburgh or Glasgow).

Also, the restaurant Mestizo in London has tamales on the menu, and as Mestizo is easily the best Mexican restaurant in the UK, I'm sure they are delicious. Have some chiles rellenos for a starter.

Review of Cool Chile Company Tortillas

Some Cool Chile Company tortillas, with a few of their friends

Being MexiGeek, I do a lot of labour-intensive cooking. I don't buy tins of chopped tomatoes. I buy fresh tomatoes, asar-roast them, and bash the living hell out of them in my molcajete.


I don't buy ground spices like cumin, clove, and cinnamon. I buy whole seeds or sticks, toast them in a pan until they release their fragrance, and then grind them by hand in my molcajete. (I don't own a spice grinder.)


And I make my own corn tortillas, which takes forever.

But I'm a MexiGeek. That's just what I do. What if you want to eat Mexican food and you don't want to spend your whole night cooking and then eat dinner at 10pm?


When I arrived in the UK in 2001, I couldn't find corn tortillas, even at Mexican restaurants. But now that supermarkets are selling disgusting polenta/wheat flour hybrid things as "corn tortillas", I feel it's my duty to steer my readers in the right direction.

Because you can now get real corn tortillas here in the UK: just order them from the Cool Chile Company.


First a bit of background on Triple C.


The Cool Chile Company began importing dried chiles from Mexico into the UK in the early 1990s. Many, many Mexican recipes call for dried chiles, so they're an essential part of authentic Mexican cuisine. Also, because of the historical ties to India, most fresh chillies available in the UK are Asian varieties. CCC were one of the first (if not the first to make Mexican chiles available in Britain.


Honestly, I could not cook without these guys.


In 2005 they brought in the UK's first ever tortilla press (which they named "Lupita") and began making the UK's first (as far as I know) ever real Mexican corn tortillas. Demand has grown, so Lupita has been replaced by El Monstruo ("the Monster"), which makes 3,500 tortillas an hour.

You can order these tortillas online. They ship anywhere in the UK and Europe.

By the way, I don't know these guys personally. I learned this from their website, which I visit frequently.


I've bought these tortillas a few times. They're a real lifesaver when you want tacos but can't be bothered spending the two hours or so it takes to make a homemade batch.

So how good are they? Well, consider I basically fisked the sub-par Old El Paso tortillas, I feel I should be systematic.

Appearance. Professional. They are perfectly round and just the right colour (because they are made from real masa harina (and not polenta like some commercial brands). Basically, if you placed these next to any of the commercial brands in North America, you could not tell the difference.

Taste. Spot. On.

This is exactly what tortillas are meant to taste like (I should also add that the inviting smell of proper tortillas greets you when you open the pack).

You have to reheat them before using (helpful instructions are on the package). Corn tortillas need to be warm to unlock their flavour. Also, because corn is gluten-free, a cold tortilla cannot be folded like a flour one can.


Texture. Again, spot on, because these are made from just masa harina and water. They have a uniform thickness and when warm they fold easily without falling apart (very important for tacos).

Usefulness. The Cool Chile Company actually sells two kinds of tortilla: soft ones for tacos (the kind I bought) and "frying tortillas", which are a bit coarser and are for making tostadas and totopos (tortilla chips).

I used the soft tortillas for my tacos de carnitas de pollo, and they worked brilliantly as expected. The next day for a snack I heated a tortilla up, put some cheese in it, folded it and finished it off on a hot dry frying pan before drowning it in chile sauce: a rough quesadilla. It was so good I had to make another right away.

And although they don't recommend you fry these tortillas, I found they worked perfectly for baked totopos:

Cut the tortillas into wedges (I used a pizza-cutter).

Preheat the oven to 150° C.

Grease a baking sheet and lay the tortilla wedges on it.

Using a pastry brush, brush them with some oil (I used olive oil, to keep them as healthy as possible).

Then bake for 15-20 minutes. Keep an eye on them so they don't burn. They will continue to crisp a bit as they cool.

Sprinkle lightly with salt as soon as they're our of the oven. These are way more delicious and much healthier than crisps.

So are there any negatives?


Well, as with all professional, machine-made tortillas, they lack the charming irregularity of homemade tortillas. Also, commercial tortillas like these are never slightly charred, they way homemade ones often are.

Also, because these are made from masa harina instead of masa, conventional wisdom holds that you can't use them for enchiladas or chilaquiles, though I actually made chilaquiles with my baked totopos and found they worked fine.

In any case, these aren't really negatives. There's nothing like a fresh homemade tortilla. But if you want it you're gonna work for it. With these on hand, you can have tacos as an easy mid-week meal, instead of a big production thing you have to leave for the weekend.

Bottom line. I really can't fault these. They are, as far as I know, the only authentic corn tortillas available in the UK. It's this or homemade. 

Review of Old El Paso store-bought tortillas

One of my readers recently informed me that corn tortillas are available in Lidl in Edinburgh. Though flour tortilla "wraps" have been in all British supermarkets for as long as I've lived here, the only corn tortillas I was aware of were in prepackaged "taco kits", and they were usually those (American) U-shaped hard-shell things. You didn't used to get proper corn tortillas at all.

And, for the most part, you still don't.

This info about Lidl inspired me to do something I've long wanted to do: review a Mexican food product (or restaurant).

I don't get over to Lidl much now that I don't live in the city centre, but I decided to see of my local super-chain grocery store had anything posing as corn tortillas. Whereas flour tortillas are mainstream enough to be kept in the bread aisle, what they pass off as corn tortillas lurked in the "World Foods" section.

As I expected, they had two brands: Discovery and Old El Paso.

For my British readers, let me tell you about Mexican food brands in the US. We do have Old El Paso, but they mostly sell jarred salsas and spice powders, etc. I never saw Old El Paso tortillas until I moved to the UK.

In America, you buy Mission brand tortillas (they sell both flour and corn). There's even a Mission tortilla factory in the California Adventure park at Disneyland. They'll give you free corn tortillas if it's your birthday. And for commercially produced sauces and seasonings, we tend to go for La Preferida, which is made by and for Mexican-Americans. We don't have Discovery products at all.

Having said that, I have usually gone for Discovery brand products here in the UK, because of the bizarre combination of my mistrust of the familiar (even when I have no reason to trust a non-Mexican brand of Mexican foods) and because I've never rated Old El Paso, even back in the US.

When we couldn't be bothered making our own salsa, my family always bought Pace brand picante sauce, which isn't available in Britain. Pace is made in San Antonio, by folks who know what picante sauce is supposed to taste like. Old El Paso, despite the name, is made in New York City, and that really chaps my hide, as explained in this advert:

Notice that both Pace and Old El Paso are trying to associate themselves with Texas, rather than Mexico. 

However, there is a more serious reason I didn't sample Discovery corn tortillas, despite Isabel Hood's belief that they are better than Old El Paso.

When I got to the "World Foods" section of the giant Morrainsburysco near my suburb, I found that the Old El Paso brand said "now with less fat." Immediately red flags were flying. Why was there any significant amount of fat in the first place?

There are basically two recipes for corn tortillas. The first is the über-traditional (or shall I say "sobre-tradicional") method.

1) Take some white Mexican field corn.
2) Soak it in slaked lime (the same stuff you use to make stucco).
3) Rinse it clean. The tough outer hulls will slip off.
4) Grind it on a metate until it becomes a dough called masa. Shape it into tortillas and cook them on a comal.

White Mexican field corn is hard to come by in Britain, and I don't really endorse using a highly caustic substance like slaked lime in the kitchen. But they do sell masa harina here. I get Maseca, the standard Mexican brand, from Lupe Pinto's. The Cool Chile Company sells it as well, and MexGrocer even sells blue masa harina!. All three suppliers ship throughout the UK.

In case you haven't read my other posts on tortillas, masa harina is white Mexican field corn ground into flour. It is NOT cornflour, cornstarch, cornmeal, or polenta. If you try to make tortillas with any of these things, you will fail. But since you can get real masa harina in Britain, you can make tortillas the modern way, which is:
1) Combine masa harina and hand-hot water and knead it into a dough
2) Let it rest ten minutes, covered with a damp cloth (don't chill it. Mexico is a hot country).
3) Shape the dough into tortillas and cook them on a comal.

In either recipe, there's really only one ingredient: corn. So apart from any naturally occurring fat in the corn itself, there should have been no fat to speak of.

I turned over the package and read the ingredients. I was prepared to see some kind of preservative listed, but I was not expecting to find wheat flour. And, of course, there was vegetable oil as well, because flour tortillas do require some kind of fat to help them bind (traditionally you would use lard).

I checked the Discovery brand. They, too, had a mixture of corn and wheat flour, but Old El Paso listed corn first,  while Discovery listed it second. So I went with Old El Paso.

Appearance. If you look closely at these so-called corn tortillas, you can see tiny flecks of yellow. It wouldn't surprise me if these guys are just mixing polenta in with their flour tortilla ingredients. The ingredients claim it is 29% corn flour, but that could mean anything. I'm guess it doesn't mean masa harina. And it probably does mean they're using the wrong kind of corn.

Do not eat this at home. Or anywhere else.

Taste. Too sweet, and not in a good way, which once again probably means they used the wrong kind of corn: common yellow corn or "sweetcorn" as it's called in Britain. We all love sweetcorn; it rocks. But it does have a pretty high sugar content. White field corn has bigger kernels and is much higher in starch. I haven't tried it, but apparently soup made from this corn has the consistency of potato soup. Tortillas, whether corn or flour, should not be sweet. In fact, you should have to add sugar to the masa harina if you're making sweet tamales.

Texture. Gritty, and somewhat fragile. Partly this is due to the polenta, which is too coarse to mix into a proper dough, and partly this is due to the fact that, since it is basically a corn-flavoured flour tortilla and they reduced the fat, there wasn't enough fat to bind the tortillas properly. Sweetcorn, being less starchy than field corn, cannot pick up the slack.

Usefulness. I don't think anyone, even people relatively unfamiliar with Mexican food, would expect Old El Paso corn tortillas to be very high quality. But can they get the job done?

Well, I ate these all week. I wouldn't recommend them for traditional "soft" tacos, as the flavour is just not there. The package actually recommends you use them for enchiladas, but they mean American-style baked enchiladas, where you fill the tortillas, fold them, put them in a baking dish and cover them with jarred enchilada sauce (they recommend Old El Paso brand; I do not) and bake them until the tortillas get hard and unpleasant.

This probably would work, but the more authentic way to make enchiladas is take the tortilla, dip it in home-made red chile sauce, quick-fry it in some fat, and then fill it and fold it. Messy, but worth it.

When I tried to do this with one of  these, the damn thing disintegrated on me. However, I did manage to quick-fry one in butter, cover it in home-made chile sauce, top it with scrambled eggs and poblano chile strips (huevos revueltos con rajas) and some grated parmesan, which was a very good breakfast, except for the tortilla.

The rajas were fecking awesome. The tortilla, not so much.

Bottom line. My expectations were already low, and yet Old El Paso still managed to fall short. I am a firm believer that we can all make our own corn tortillas, and yet even I have sometimes been put off making tacos because I couldn't be bothered going to all that trouble. So quality store-bought tortillas are a must. But these are not them. If this is really the only thing you can get your hands on, buy some Mission flour tortillas and switch to burritos.