Recently, I sent an e-mail to an acquaintance who grew up in Tucson, explaining that I’d be heading there to visit my relatives and make green corn tamales. “That’s right,” she wrote back. “I forgot. It’s fall.” And I could tell she was imagining what South Tucson looks like around now, when a string of giant trucks fill driveways all along 12th Avenue, their back doors rolled up to reveal towering pyramids of young white corn being picked over by customers, who strip back each translucent husk to do the fingernail test: If milky liquid leaks from the kernels when you poke them with your fingernail, buy that ear—it’s fresh. Right alongside the trucks, green chiles are roasted in perforated barrels and then packaged for sale in plastic baggies. Once you have the corn and chiles, all you need is Queso Panela (a smooth, white Mexican cheese made from cow’s milk), Queso Anejado (an aged, crumbly, white Mexican cheese), butter, and at least three or four friends. Then you can have your own tamalada—a tamale-making assembly line that ends up being a party with plenty of edible take-home prizes.
Until I took my place in the human conveyor belt, led by my friend Mercedes Templeton, I wasn’t sure what made green corn tamales different, other than the fact that they’re milder in flavor and made with fresher ingredients (that’s the “green” part; it has nothing to do with the color of the corn or the filling). Typically, tamales are made with masa de harina (cornmeal) that’s reconstituted with water and turned into dough. But with this variation, you remove the outer leaves from the corn, put them aside for later, and make your own masa by taking a very sharp knife and, as Mercedes showed us, deeply slicing—almost scraping—the kernels off the ear, then mixing them in a food processor along with cheese, butter, and fat (in my family’s pseudo-kosher recipe, lard is replaced with Crisco). The masa is then spooned into the fresh, pliable corn husks (as opposed to the more conventional dried husks from the supermarket that must be soaked first in water). Instead of a spicy meat filling, a single, thin strip of roasted chile is placed on top of the layer of masa. After that, it’s fold, fold, tuck, fold; when you have a dozen or so wrapped tamales, you steam them for about an hour (or until you peel back the husk wrapper and the consistency of the masa is firm).
Some people say that green corn tamales were invented in Tucson, while others insist that the way the corn husks are used indicate origins in the Northern Veracruz region of Mexico. Either way, I’d never tasted tamales quite as perfectly fluffy and delicate in flavor as the dozens we made that afternoon.
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