Tamales: A Delicious Corn Dish From Latin America!

Tamales come from Latin America and consist mainly of corn, which is processed sweet or salty with other ingredients.

Tamales virtually accompany the daily routine in Latin America. They are available in sweet and salty, for breakfast, lunch or dinner, as a dessert, at home and at street stalls. Today we would like to introduce you to this typical dish of Latin America.

Tamales: typically Latin America!

Every Latin American traveler knows tamales : delicious parcels made of corn, wrapped in leaves, cooked and served sweet or salty at any time of the day – or eaten straight out of the hand as fast food on the street.

The Mayas and Aztecs were already familiar with this type of preparation, which has remained unchanged to this day: a kind of dough made from corn semolina is spread on leaves with other ingredients such as cheese, fish, meat or honey. These sheets are folded into small packages and the dish is cooked in them.

Almost every country in Latin America has its own typical recipe for tamales. Depending on the region, the name changes a little and, in particular, the leaf in which the corn is cooked varies from region to region. Often it is dried corn leaves, but often banana leaves are also used.

If you would like to try the recipe yourself, the leaves of corn are easy to get for you in the autumn shortly before the corn harvest.

Homemade tamales recipe

It takes a lot of work to prepare, so don’t let the amount of ingredients put you off. Tamales are always made in advance due to the long preparation time. You can freeze the cooked parcels without any problems. You need the following ingredients:

• 2 onions
• approx. 500 ml chicken broth
• Green chilli pepper (s) to taste
• 2 cloves of garlic
• 1kg corn flour or corn grits
• Corn leaves
• 250g butter
• 500g tomatoes
• 500g chicken fillet (cooked)
• 90ml vegetable oil (rapeseed or sunflower oil)
• 1 tablespoon of baking powder

First of all, the dough needs to be prepared. Mix the baking powder with the corn. Then gradually stir the chicken stock into the corn, making sure that no lumps form. The dough shouldn’t be too soft, but also not too firm, so that you can still shape it, but it neither crumbles nor runs. If necessary, add a little more water or chicken broth.

While the dough swells a little, you have time to prepare the sauce. To do this, cut the onions, tomatoes and garlic into small pieces and put everything together with a little water in a saucepan over medium heat. Simmer the ingredients for about 10 minutes until everything is cooked through. Then puree everything with the hand blender to a creamy sauce.

Now pluck the cooked chicken fillet into small, bite-sized pieces and lay out the corn leaves. If they are so dry and stubborn that they break, moisten them a little. Important: If you have collected the corn leaves from the field yourself, you should remove pesticides extremely well with a vegetable brush and plenty of water before using them.

Now place a corn leaf on a flat surface and brush the leaf with about two heaping tablespoons of batter. Then add a tablespoon of sauce and a few pieces of chicken. Brush the corn leaves this way until you run out of batter.

Now fold the leaves tightly together so that the sauce and meat are completely covered in dough. Make sure that the corn packets are tightly closed so that they cannot burst. Use kitchen twine or corn leaves cut into strips as a string.

Now put on a large saucepan with water and bring the water to a boil. Then put the corn packets in the pot and let them simmer gently for about 50 minutes. Then the tamales are ready and can either be eaten hot immediately or frozen when cooled.