12.24- Rainbow and Tamales

Rainbow over Academy Street

This afternoon I took a break from making tamales, and found this rainbow right outside the front door.

It was over in a few minutes, which was just as well, as I had to get back to cooking.

Today I made the chile sauce that I will use to spice the pork filling for tamales...

First I roasted the dried chiles, a mixture of New Mexico, California and (most important) Ancho chiles. I spread the chiles on a cookie sheet and broiled them BRIEFLY (don't burn 'em!) on each side, just getting them warm without smoking:

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Next I immersed the roasted chiles into boiling temperature water, removed the pot from the heat, and weighted down the floating chiles with another pan containing some hot water for added weight:

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I removed the chiles after about 15 minutes of soaking, and put the "tea" in which they had soaked aside... I will use the chile "tea" as water when I make the masa dough for the outsides of the tamales.

The tea may add a little flavor to the masa, but for me the most important thing is that it adds the proper color to the tamales: masa with plain water turns out kind of white, while I am used to a yellow-orange color of tamales in San Antonio... The chile tea does the trick!:

(Click image for full size)

Next I removed the stems and some of the seeds (fewer seeds makes it less spicy hot) from the cooled chile pods, and ground the wet chile pods in a blender to make a chile paste (add some of the tea to the blender to get the chile mixture to blend down to right consistency):

(Click image for full size)

Next I added the chile paste, comino and secret ingrediments to a tablespoon of hot corn oil in a saucepan and fried it all up very briefly... don't burn those spices!

PHEW! Now that's done, all I have to do is prepare the shredded pork, add the chile past to taste, soak the corn husks, make the masa, assemble the tamales and steam them till done!

No sweat.

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