Made several a few weeks ago with my brother and his family but wanted another go. Cooked a Boston but, some venison, and a few pounds of chicken thighs. Came out really good, the deer were by far my favorite. Next time think we will go straight venison no pork. Made a red Chile sauce for the pork and venison and a green sauce for the chicken.

A heck of a lot of work, but apparently worth it. Looks good!

It is some work but I enjoy it. Like sausage making of another culture. That and I think if you want to eat good tamales you almost have to make them yourself. Bought ones are all masa no meat most are pretty bland. Of the ones we sampled, they are probably the best tamales I e had in 10 years and we are just a bunch of German/polish gringos.

That’s a whole lot of work , but what a reward it can be! I love tamales

Redchevy, I have always wanted to try this. Do you have a favorite process/recipe you can point me toward?
I have mostly bought them from "quiet old Mexican guys standing outside the liquor store with a cooler."

Taste better from scratch recipe

Hope link above works. This is a start to finish recipe for the meat filling Chile sauce and dough with how to. I have used this recipe a few times, this time I used a pre made masa from H‑E‑B and only used the red sauce recipe to put on the meat. Tamales are very easy to experiment with. The 5 pound pack of pre made masa makes about 5 dozen tamales. I think one pork but would be enough for a pack of masa. We cooked 1 pork but one whole chicken about 5 lbs of thighs and a 2-3 lb venison roast. For the meat season how you want and braise it till very tender drain remove skin fat bones etc and shred then mix with the Chile sauce and meat is ready to go.

If memory serves the recipe is for 1.5 lb meat and makes about 2 dozen tamales. For starters I would recommend cooking and prepping the meat and sauce a day ahead, it seems to simplify the process for me especially the first time. The masa from scratch recipe is good but the premade stuff we used was good also. Watch a YouTube video on wrapping/rolling them. We had some extra help that didn’t do so great in this department, but they learned. After filled you need to steam them. Seems to be a lot of differing thoughts on steaming, my steamer holds 4-5 dozen and I would put it on till the water boiled and set a timer for 45 min. Some places say 20 min some 2 hours. 45 min worked fine for us.

Let me know if you have any other questions, but with the super lag in the forum it’s hard to post too much and for whatever reason I can’t seem to get the photo uploaded to work today.

Gracias amigo!

👍👍

I'm all in now. Ordered a "masa spreader" and a copy of "Tamales 101" from the Zon.

Yeh buddy.

Well, I made a half recipe from the back of the Tamal masa sack.
Learned some things:
1. It's not that hard!
2. Just knead the masa and then knead in the melted lard/salt/baking powder by hand. Easy. To heck with mixers.
3. Use reasonably uniform husks (I soaked three hours) and don't mess with the ones with deep splits.
4. Don't need spreaders or anything that fancy. Cowboy Kent uses the back of a spoon. I just used my fingers.
5. A meat filling will kind of stay put, but the three (out of 15) bean/cheese tamales I made, the filling and masa kind of expanded out, maybe from boiling/melting?
6. Make at least a full recipe for gosh sakes! I kicked myself for making the half batch, and needing stand a couple of coffee cups in the steamer to fill the empty space and keep the tamales upright while they steamed.
I still need to figure out just how much masa mix to spread on the husks and how close to the "mouth" for proper presentation. Gotta do these with green chile chicken and pork chile verde as well. Mine are more round than flat. Dunno if this makes a difference.

Alright! The thing I regretted most about only making a few was that I could eat 2 dozen tamales quick and none to share.

I’ve eaten homemade tamales and chili for lunch every day this week

Yes to lot's a Tamales

Had some last night with a big pot of deer chili, leftovers for lunch