Navidad Tamalera

So since this was David's tropical Christmas in, and if I'm not mistaken his first Christmas away from the U.S. and away from his family, we decided we would adopt his family's Mexican Christmas tradition of making Tamales. This is no small commitment in Paraguay, where to my knowledge the Mexican population is limited to one NGO employee who is married to a Paraguayan. No masa or maseca is available in Paraguay so we had to do the whole process entirely from scratch. My mother brought us some powdered lime (cal) from the Mexican store in the U.S., and we proceeded to do everything ourselves from gathering the banana leaves, to making the nixtamal and grinding the masa, to cooking the filling and forming the tamales. Here it is, all documented. David wanted to be sure we didn't miss a single step of his tamalero exploits.


Well, they don't sell packages of dried corn husks in Paraguay, but luckily the place is silly with banana trees. Here is David harvesting some leaves from a small banana tree in my cousins' yard.
Rinsing the corn

Cooking the corn in the lime-water.
The result of cooking the corn in the lime-water. According to the instructions we were following, at this point, they the corn was supposed to swell up and its hulls are supposed to sort of dissolve into a slimy mess, leaving the white kernel of nixtamal behind. We must have been using a not appropriate variety of corn, because nothing remotely like that happened. We went on as though everything was fine though, because what else were we going to do? I'm not sure what went wrong, but the end result did not suffer for it.
Grinding the corn in the molino. This was quite a process. We ended up attaching the mill to a bench and working as a team. One of us would sit on the bench to weigh it down and load the corn in the hopper while the other one would grind away until he was too tired. Then we would switch, and so on until the entire vat of corn was ground.
The ground nixtamal.

The large cube of tamal dough that resulted from mixing the masa with lard and some broth.

Since the rest of Christmas dinner consisted of various kinds of pork, including this little guy (who turned out to be delicious slow roasted on the grill)




We decided to go with untraditional chicken as the filling for our tamales. Here is the chicken cooking in a broth. Incidentally 'with giblets' in Paraguay includes not just the gizzards, and liver and neck as in the U.S., but also the heart, the feet, and the head!While the chicken was cooking, David was making the chile sauce from dried chiles I had brought from the U.S. fur just such a special occasion. Here is the cooked shredded chicken mixed with the chile suace.


Here are all the tamal fixings ready to go, and the tortillera that my mom also brought from me from the U.S.Setting up the tamales in a make-shift steamer.


and finally serving them up at the dinner table.


The happy customers.


David claimed that these were the best tamales he had ever eaten and that the entire process of making them from scratch is worthwhile. Not having had nearly as many tamales as he has, I couldn't vouch for their authenticity. I can say that everyone really liked them a lot, which was a big relief. I think we both would have been disappointed if, after working so hard (the entire process took about two days), people weren't really crazy about them. But my family, which never really liked tamales before, said they were great, and my relatives liked them so much that they enthusiastically helped out when we used up the leftover masa in a goodbye party before my trip back to Boston.