I received an advance copy of Tamales and thought it was worth giving a review. You can quickly figure out the content of the book from the title. You are about to get some tamale knowledge! Tamale is Ms. Tapp's second tamale book and focuses on an accessible approach to making tamales that encourages the use of simple steps and store-bought ingredients to produce tasty tamales. Ms. Tapp teaches tamale-making along the west coast and operates a restaurant that focuses on, yes, tamales. Her experience and expertise shines through this book.
I have a soft spot for Mexican and Americanized versions like Tex-Mex and Cali-Mex. I have two very specific memories of tamales as a child. My mother was adopted as a baby by a nice couple in 1950. My grandmother was Mexican but her family's lineage goes through Europe. (Their family is an interesting story for another time.) Although my mom was raised in California, after she graduated high school the family packed up and moved to Douglas, Arizona on the US-Mexican border. We didn't see our grandparents often (our family moved to Texas when I was three) but when we did we loaded up on delicious Mexican food brought across the border by my grandmother or her housekeeper. Among those delicious care packages were tamales. Moist masa and well-spiced pork. Even after weeks in the freezer they came out delicious. One time in 1990 we burned through our carefully enjoyed supply of authentic tamales. I convinced my parents to obtain more tamales at the grocery store, where apparently they were sold in cans. As a nine year old, a lot of my food came out of a can so I wasn't too worried. I should have been. What came out of the can were goopy, soggy, salty things that were like vienna sausages coated in chili powder and some type of grease. After that can it took a long time to trust tamales. (My grandparents passed on a few years later.) Somewhere in between the best tamales and the worst tamales of my life fall most tamales I have eaten since. The main criticism is that the masa is too dry and crumbly or too wet and soggy. A short second is that the filling is often bland and greasy. I have long desired to find the technique and recipes that would get me somewhere close to those magical tamales I ate as a kid. This might be it.
Tamales gives an extensive list of options for each key component of tamales and each type of tamale you can find. The components well explained with plenty of unique recipes include masa (the corn exterior), sauces/salsas and of course, the filling. Tamales offers more than just the usual pork tamale. There are all sorts of proteins from the easily available to those hard to find. There are vegetarian and vegan tamales as well as dessert tamales. Ms. Tapp offers explanation for several types of tamale presentations from varied corn husk and banana leaf wrapping techniques to inside out tamales where the filing is served on top or on the side of a solid masa roll that is gaining popularity in restaurants. The great thing about the diversity of recipes in this book is that you could spend a day preparing multiple tamales from this book and freeze them for weeks of eating without getting bored of eating the same thing.
Tamales keeps the recipes simple but flavorful. This book does a really good job of showing tamale making for the beginner with ingredients accessible at major grocery stores but producing delicious tamales. There are also helpful tips for important steps like how much masa and filing to use and how to figure out if the masa is ready by using basic kitchen tools or simple techniques that do not rely on experience to get it right. That is a nice way to avoid having to make a few test batches of failures to get the technique right. Those little tidbits pay for the book right there (which is why I'm not saying what they are). You can easily take these basic recipes to a more advanced level by subbing out the store-bought ingredients for your own homemade recipes. For example, the chicken mole poblano tamales call for store bought mole sauce but you could make your own far superior mole sauce for those tamales. Vegetables can be swapped out for heirloom varieties from your garden. Chiles can be swapped to make more complex sauces.
If there is one thing to criticize, it is the extremely short space spent explaining how to roll tamales. The book offers four pages of crude drawings showing ten different wrapping styles. The instructions are not especially clear but you can get a better sense of how to fill the wrapper for the different types of wrap styles by looking at some of the full size photos through the book. I would have liked to see a full chapter with photos of each step for each style as well as some helpful tips about wrapping. Rolling or wrapping in food prep requires both technique and experience. The more technique you know the less you have to rely on experience to figure it out. A few YouTube videos helped clarify but once you understand the way the book's illustrations are drawn then it makes more sense.
Overall, a great reference point for the new to moderately experienced tamale maker looking for recipes you can trust for each ingredient. There are so many good recipes and recipe combinations you can make out of this book that you could spend a lot of time developing your skills with tamales before you feel the need to branch out.
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