Green Onion Tamales

Christmas 2012 was the first year that my family didn't go to my dad's side for Christmas.  My Grandad had passed away 3 1/2 years earlier and my Grandma was no longer capable of taking care of herself and wasn't in the house anymore. 

Therefore, my parents were trying to figure out how we were going spend the day.  They decided to make tamales.  I had never had a tamale before, I think I've tried to make them before and failed horribly.  That afternoon, though convinced me that I really liked tamales. 

Today, I got a chance to make tamales for myself.  This version was green onion based and the recipe was from Bobby Flay.

The condiment for the tamales, green onion butter.  I brought a stick of butter to room temperature and mixed it with sliced green onions.

This recipe surprised me a bit in that I didn't realize that I was going to make my own masa, and not use corn flour and water.  For the masa though it's pretty simple, corn, shortening, butter, green onions, onions, chicken broth, corn meal, sugar, salt and pepper.  The corn husks are what you pack and cook the dough in.

The dough started by taking the corn onion and chicken broth and putting it into the food processor until the mixture was smooth.  I then combined the corn meal, sugar, salt, pepper until the dough formed and then I cut in the butter and shortening along with sliced green onions.  This is what the dough looked like before going into the corn husks.

The hardest part of the tamales was filling and tying the corn husks to make sure the dough cooked properly.  To prep the corn husks they soaked in water for a couple of hours and then were filled with a couple spoonfuls of dough.  I then folded them up into little pouches and tied them off with butcher's string.  Once All tied up, they went into a pan to steam for about an hour.

Once the tamales had steamed I removed them from the corn husks where they unfortunately kind of fell apart, which is a sign that they hadn't cooked quite enough.  I unpacked them and put them onto a baking sheet and finished them in the oven long enough to melt the butter.

Overall, delicious, I'd need to make little tweaks here and there but overall a fun dish, that wasn't nearly as complicated as I thought.