Among the most “typical” foods that can be found in Guatemala are tamales, and their little brothers “chuchitos” (which literally translates to "little street dogs", who knows why!). Both are leaf-wrapped corn-dough-based warm mushy concoctions with tomato-based sauce and a small piece of meat inside, usually chicken for chuchitos and chicken or beef for tamales. While I like chuchitos and previously have been taught how to make them, I am not so much a fan of tamales, which are just a little bit too mushy for me. But, since they are so quintessentially Guatemalan (although tamales can be found throughout Latin America, Guatemalan tamales are a little different than others) I decided to take advantage of my time here to learn how to make them.
I learned that the reason that tamales are so mushy is that, unlike chuchitos, the masa (corn dough) is cooked before making the tamales. This requires constantly stirring the dough for about 45 minutes over the stove, and toward the end of cooking it gets rather thick and difficult to stir – it's a good arm workout! I also learned that there are several variations on the kind of sauce you can use; our sauce used dried mild chile peppers, tomatoes, sesame seeds, cinnamon, garlic, and onion, which resulted in a strong but pleasantly unique flavor. Strips of red bell pepper and raisins were also added on top of the tamal for extra flavor and decoration before wrapping each tamal in a fresh-cut (and cleaned) “maxan” leaf from the back yard.
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| Roasting some of the sauce ingredients |
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| Toasting more sauce ingredients |
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| Mixing ground corn with water to make the corn dough |
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| Cooking the chicken |
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| The finished sauce |
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| Stirring the masa/corn dough |
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| How to tell if the dough is cooked: drop a teaspoon of the dough into water - if it sinks, it's done. |
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Assembling a tamal - first masa/dough, then chicken, then sauce, then two slice of pepper and two raisins.
Then the tamal gets wrapped up in the leaf and cooked for a half-hour. |
I forgot to take a picture of a finished tamal, but it basically looks like a beige rectangle - nothing too exciting.
Yours don't sound particularly spicy, but there is that phrase "a hot tamale." Perhaps in Mexico they are typically a spicier dish. In that picture stirring the masa it looks like Cream of Wheat, though the finished dough does not. Bravo for you for learning about them even though they aren't something you particularly enjoy eating. That's what I call really learning about a culture!
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