Grilled Corn Tamales del Elote
Because we missed Fucking Delicious Friday this week, today is going to have to be Super-awesome Sunday. And boy is this one special: Tamales del Elote, or sweet corn. These are my favorite tamales, which is sort of like saying, “My favorite ice cream,” or, “My favorite Christmas ever,” or, “My favorite million-dollar lottery win.”
Fresh corn, green chile, and lots of butter.
Tamales del Elote.
Because we missed Fucking Delicious Friday this week, today is going to have to be Super-awesome Sunday. And boy is this one special: Tamales del Elote, or sweet corn. These are my favorite tamales, which is sort of like saying, “My favorite ice cream,” or, “My favorite Christmas ever,” or, “My favorite million-dollar lottery win.”
Tamales represent tremendously important part of world cuisine. They have a long history that I can’t even begin to touch on - they are nine thousand years old, after all. They are a symbol of family and celebration and community to millions of people.
Tamales are not a part of my cultural history. But I love them and thank the brilliant Mesoamericans who invented them, and all their descendants who perfected them, because they are wonderful, glorious little packages of All My Favorite Flavors.
For this particular recipe, I also have Mark Miller and the Coyote Cafe of Santa Fe to thank. It’s not 100% traditional. I mean, butter instead of lard in your tamales: Sacrilege? Brilliance? You be the judge. One thing no one can debate is that they are fucking delicious.
It starts will a little masa and a lot of fresh grilled sweet corn. Add some green chiles for heat and a little monterey jack to bind it all together.
Peel back the husks and de-silk those bastards - they’re going on the grill.
Yep, I am going to make you grill sweet corn. It’s not that hard. Don’t whine or I will make you roast your own goddamned green chiles.
Besides, roasting corn might be the hardest part of the whole recipe. These tamales don’t have any filling, you see, just masa batter. Plunk that shit unceremoniously on your corn husk and fold it like a Christmas package…full of butter.
And if butter isn’t on your Christmas list, get thee back to Google. You’re dead to me.
Shit You Need
15-16 Dried corn husks, for rolling. For some recipes you can use fresh corn husks, leftover from whatever you’re doing with your fresh corn. But in this case, you are going to char the shit out of those husks, so you gotta go with the backups in your pantry.
4 ears of fresh corn
1 cup milk
2 cups masa harina
1 1/2 cup unsalted butter, softened
2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
1 cup roasted, finely diced green chiles.
Options, from most to least hard-core: 1. Buy fresh Hatch green chiles (I like the Big Jim variety), roast, peel and dice. 2. Buy frozen green chiles and have them shipped from New Mexico. 3. Use jarred Hatch green chiles, or a can of Hatch branded green chile. 4. Use whatever canned green chile you can find. I won’t judge. Much.
1 cup shredded Monterey Jack cheese
This is what your dough looks like after mixing: fluffy, and studded with all sorts of yummy.
You had me at Tamale.
Keep Calm and justeffingcook
Soak two dozen large corn husks in warm water until pliable. Leave them in water until you need them. (You’re soaking in it!)
Start your gas grill, or prepare your charcoal grill. Peel back the husks from the ears of sweet corn, and remove the silks. Fold the husks back in place, then soak the ears in cold, salted water for 10 minutes. Grill over medium heat for 20 minutes, turning every five minutes. Let cool, and remove husks.
Cut the kernels off the cobs: Holding by the narrow end, stand the cob upright in a large bowl. Using a large chef’s knife and starting halfway down the cob, slice the kernels off at the base. Rotate the cob to go the full circumference, then invert the cob and repeat on the other side. Easy peasy, corncob squeegee.
Place the corn in a medium saucepan, add the milk, and simmer until the corn has softened, about 10 min.
Remove 2 cups of corn kernels and set aside. Puree the remaining corn with the milk. Add to the masa harina and mix.
In a large bowl, whip the butter, baking powder, and salt until light and fluffy. Incorporate the masa one heaping tablespoon at a time, and keep whipping until even lighter and fluffier. I usually do this with a stand mixer, so I can walk away and prep my corn husks.
Fold in the reserved corn kernels, green chile, and cheese.
Select 15-16 of your favorite corn husks (large and pliable), dry them, and line them up on your counter.
Divide the dough between the corn husks ( a solid palmful in each, maybe 3 tablespoons) and fold into a little buttery package.
Use a steamer insert over a pot of boiling water. Place the tamales into the steamer, open ends up, and cook for 30 minutes.
Serve with salsa verde.
Buttery Tamales del Elote on a bed of bright, spicy salsa verde.
Salsa Verde
There are plenty of great salsa verde recipes out there. One could argue you don’t even really need a recipe: roasted tomatillos, serranos, garlic, a little lime, and cilantro. Season to taste. Hard to go wrong.
There are plenty of great salsa verde recipes out there. One could argue you don’t even really need a recipe: roasted tomatillos, serranos, garlic, a little lime, and cilantro. Season to taste. Hard to go wrong.
But I include this for completeness so you don’t have to ask Mr. Google what he thinks about it.
You’re welcome.
Shit You Need
2 lbs tomatillos (about 15 med-large)
1/2 onion , roughly chopped
2 cloves garlic
1-2 serrano peppers, seeded
juice of 1 lime
2 pinches salt (more to taste)
freshly ground pepper
1/2 bunch of cilantro, stems and all.
Tomatillos, blistered under the broiler.
Keep Calm and justeffingcook
Remove the husks from the tomatillos and rinse those plump green bastards. Scatter them over a sheet pan and stick them under the broiler as an example to the other vegetables. Just in case they were thinking about going bad in the bottom of your fridge.
Once the tomatillos are a bit blistered, dump them in your blender along with any juices left on the sheet pan.
Optional: add your onion and garlic to that same pan, or char them lightly over one of your gas burners. Not into it? Toss them into the blender raw.
Add all the other ingredients and blend.
Taste and adjust seasoning. Now, wasn’t that easy????
Note that I do not include cumin in this recipe. You know how some people taste soap when they eat cilantro? Well, when I taste cumin…that’s all I can taste. I’m a cumin super-taster - I should get a t-shirt made.
I will add it to some things, but at 1/4 the dose usually called for. Here, I don’t really want the earthy flavor. I want my salsa verde bright, tangy, and a little smoky.
Pineapple Bacon Fried Rice with Duck Confit
…They have a pineapple bacon fried rice that I order every single time. Every time I’m like, “No, I have to try something different, because it’s all so amazing,” but then the wait staff comes up and I’m like, “PINEAPPLE BACON FRIED RICE WITH CONFIT DUCK!…gah, fuck.”
It is widely known that Roy Choi is the master of all things fried rice. He has taught me all I know about the dish, which arguably isn’t much, but that’s not Roy’s fault.
Well, maybe it is, because so far he has ignored all my invitations to hang at my house to cook while drinking whiskey. (Roy - call me!!! *winks)
If you don’t have his cookbook LA Son*, get it immediately. I don’t know if you have figured this out about me, but I like a good story with my food and his stories are fucking amazing.
I adapted Roy’s pork belly fried rice recipe toward a fantastic dish I had in Minneapolis at a restaurant called Lat 14. They have a pineapple bacon fried rice that I order every single time. Every time I’m like, “No, I have to try something different, because it’s all so amazing,” but then the wait staff comes up and I’m like, “PINEAPPLE BACON FRIED RICE WITH CONFIT DUCK!…gah, fuck.”
And they’re like, “Excuse me, mam?”
I grumble, “You heard me. Get me my damn fried rice.”
I have mused over why this works so well as a dish. Have you read Salt Fat Acid Heat by Samin Nosrat?* Well, I guess I’m all about the cookbook recommendations today! Although this one is as much an instruction manual on food as it is a cookbook.
And it’s awesome. Buy it now.
We know about salty, sweet, sour, spicy, and umami as the flavors we, as biological engines, recognize. But food is about so much more than that. The nose - ie our olfactory system - brings us all the flavors we recognize. Spices, herbs, with their piney and floral and citrusy and smoky notes.
And beyond flavor, there’s the texture of the food, and the visual appeal.
Salt, acid, fat and heat are the physical and chemical aspects of food that bring it balance, visual and textural appeal, and carry those basic flavors and subtle notes to us. They bring food to life and make it great.
If you don’t know cassoulet, the French version of pork and beans, it contains all the cured meats. Including cured pork and duck confit. They coexist happily there, and they do here as well.
Bacon brings smokey notes. Duck brings garlic and thyme and grassy flavors. We all know fat is flavor. Well, this dish has bacon fat and duck fat bringing all those fat-soluble aromatics to our gustatory/olfactory system.
(At your next dinner party, in 2022 or so, bring up the gustatory/olfactory system and people will look at you like you are a goddamned genius).
With all this richness and salt from the meats, pineapple brings not only welcome brightness, but both acid and sweetness to the equation. Every time you hit one of those delicious golden nuggets, it’s a jackpot. Triple cherries all the way.
And we must not forget about the Flavor Holy Trinity of ginger, garlic, and scallions.
The Flavor Holy Trinity.
This is the aromatic foundation of this dish, as it is with so much of the cooking of China and southeast Asia. There’s a good reason it is, and I bet you can guess what it is. That’s right! It’s fucking delicious!
And this is Fucking Delicious Friday, so let’s make some fried rice!
*note that while I provide Amazon links, you get double-extra-secret brownie points for going to a local independent bookseller.
I’ve smashed this ginger with the flat of a knife. And yet here I am, fifteen days without a dinner stoppage injury!
Shit You Need
4 slices of thick cut bacon, cut crosswise into strips about the width of your finger.
1-2 Tbs duck fat which you have wisely saved from making duck confit. See how smart you are?
2 scallions, chopped, white and green parts separated.
The first time my son cooked all by himself he asked, “Where does the white part stop and the green begin?” I gave him an inscrutable look and said, “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” then walked away. I was fucking with him, of course. In truth, it’s at 2/5 the total length, unless it’s Tuesday.
4 cloves of minced garlic
4 Tbs minced ginger.
I used to freeze, then grate my ginger. But I usually got tired of grating before I had enough ginger. So now I peel a section, cut 1/4 inch thick slices, smash them with the flat of my blade, and then mince the living crap out of them. Very efficient. You can also use a mallet or skillet to smash if you aren’t excited about possibly cutting the shit out of yourself.
Shredded duck confit from two duck legs, a little over 1 cup total.
4 cups of cooked, ideally day-old rice. While this is usually a dish meant to put leftover rice to good use, I sometimes make rice just so I can make fried rice from it. Don’t tell.
4 eggs, lightly whisked with a fork.
1/2 package of frozen peas, thawed
1 cup finely diced fresh pineapple
1/4 cup low-sodium soy sauce
2 tsp toasted sesame oil
Freshly ground black pepper
Keep Calm and justeffingcook
Here’s the basic layout: you’re going to fry up your bacon, set it aside, and then get everything else chopped and portioned- what those crazy French folk call mise en place. Not just fun to say, but a good idea.
The more you know…🌈
All my mise is totally place’d.
Fry the bacon to medium doneness in a wok or skillet. Remove from pan and set aside to drain on paper towels. Leave behind 2 Tbs bacon grease for later.
Prepare all other ingredients and have at the ready.
Add duck fat to your bacon fat and heat your wok over a medium-high flame. Add ginger, garlic, and scallion whites to pan, add several grinds of black pepper, and cook until fragrant, about a minute.
Add bacon and duck meat and toss to combine.
Add rice and combine well. Let the rice get a little crispy, then move it to the sides and make a well in the center.
Add your eggs to the well, letting them firm up before tossing them into the dish. You’re basically making scrambled eggs in the center of the pan while everything else waits on the sidelines. Fold in the eggs.
Add the soy sauce and sesame oil and toss to combine.
Stir in the peas and pineapple. Heat through.
Fold in the scallion greens, and serve.
It’s 2020. Shouldn’t we have scratch n’ sniff monitors by now?
NdM (Nougat de Montelimar)
If you’re like most people, nougat is almost a joke. It sounds funny when you say it (nu-git) and it’s nothing but the shit you have to get through before you hit the caramel in a Milky Way.
Holy Mother of God…it’s…
Nougat de Montelimar.
*salivates heavily
If you’re like most people, nougat is almost a joke. It sounds funny when you say it (nu-git) and it’s nothing but the shit you have to get through before you hit the caramel in a Milky Way.
But this nougat is pronounced nu-gah and it is no joke.
Twenty years ago I took a trip to France, and while there I visited a candy store. Now, let me erase the vision in your head of what you think a candy store is and paint a different picture. Imagine a room 30 feet deep and half as wide. It’s soaked in April sunlight which gleams off its marble floors. The tiles, though clean enough to eat from, have softened edges from decades of foot traffic. Through a door to a back room, you see copper kettles, each the size of a Prius. The air is filled with the scent of sugar and honey and chocolate and toasted almonds.
You approach a glass cabinet, filled with confections you do not recognize. Each one is a precious gem, a work of art. This is a palace of the sugar arts. A museum where the art is for sale and you can shove it in your face. This is a French candy shop.
This is what I walked into on that April day, and my mind was blown. I bought one of everything. Each one I ate, I admired its form, analyzed the flavors, puzzled over its ingredients. Each new morsel transported me to a rarified plane.
I thought of previous empty calories wasted on insipid flavors and vowed “Never again. No fucking way.” My life had changed.
Of all the the treats I sampled, one stood apart. It was called Nougat de Montelimar, a confection made with honey, whipped egg whites, and almonds. It became a bit of an obsession.
During the ensuing months, I tried to find it for sale in the US and couldn’t. I tried to find recipes online. This was twenty years ago, when there were two food blogs in existence and neither one had done Nougat. I came up similarly empty in my search of cookbooks. But I did find a recipe for torrone - a similar Italian candy, albeit with a slightly different consistency. In fact, I learned that there are many versions of this confection. Like many completely-fucking-amazing culinary discoveries, it spread from one place to the next, adopting unique local nuances along the way.
The Italians have torrone, the French nougat, the Spanish turón. The recipe spread to Europe via the Middle East, but may have even more ancient origins in central Asia.
I started trying things. That recipe for torrone? Too hard (texture-wise, not difficulty level). Plus it lacked a crucial component of NdM: lavender honey. I experimented more. I found a blog on the science of candy and learned some things about sucrose and dextrose, the Maillard reaction, sugar solutions and the water content at different temperatures.
One of the hitches was texture. The NdM I had had cracked if you bit into it fast, and chewed if you bit slowly. And at mouth temperature, it was all chewy and melty, with those crunchy bits of toasted nuts in the mix. Clearly some sort of sorcery was at work.
I’ll spare you the minute by minute description of the next three years. Suffice it to say that I mad a LOT of candy and tried a LOT of things until finally I got the taste right, and lo and behold, I had finally gotten a handle on that elusive texture.
I felt like God’s Idiot stumbling onto a treasure.
These days, you bastards have it easy. There are dozens of recipes out there for NdM. I had to fight for this one every step of the way. But because I am “self taught” this one may look different than the other ones you find through Mr. Google. This one gives me everything I want, including consistent results.
In France, they use giant copper kettles and stir the confection over flames for hours. You, however, are in luck. My recipe only requires a stand mixer, two heavy saucepans, and one big-ass metal bowl.
And wafer paper. This is an edible potato starch paper you can find in specialty cake and confectionary stores, typically in 8x10 sheets. It works great. The only problem is that the NdM I had in France was sandwiched in this diamond-embossed, delicate, cool-ass wafer paper, and I couldn’t find that stuff anywhere.
Sexy-ass wafer paper.
So back in the day, I did what anyone would do, and obsessed over it, searching online until I found the company in Holland that made it. I called them to ask who their North American distributor was. They didn’t have one.
But the lovely lady on the phone asked why I needed the wafer paper. I replied, “Nougat de Montelimar.”
“You know how to make it?”
“Yes, actually, I do.”
“Well,” she said. “We can’t sell you any, but we could send you some sample paper if you like…in exchange for a little nougat from your batch.”
Once I recovered my composure I said sure, sure, yeah, no problem. Still not really believing that they would actually send me wafer paper for free…or for nougat.
But you know what? They fucking did! And not just a little. A LEGIT PALLET of the stuff. And now I have enough to last for…ever.
Dude. That isn’t even all of it.
And you know what? If you swing by my place I will gift you some wafer paper. In exchange for a bottle of Pappy’s.
Now let’s make us some NdM.
Shit You Need
a 6 quart stand mixer. If you have a smaller one, you may need to cut the quantities down or risk hot candy on your counter, your floor, your jeans.
10 grams dried egg whites
30 grams sugar
2 egg whites
1/2 tsp salt
250 grams lavender honey - Be careful. You want the honey from lavender flowers, not regular honey with lavender essence added. I’ve been fooled! But if you can’t get lavender honey, regular honey works. In fact, I’ve used orange blossom honey with fantastic results.
700 grams sugar
500 grams corn syrup
100 grams water
1 vanilla bean, scraped (reserve the seeds for sone kick-ass creme bruleé)
4 Tbs melted butter - not much considering the batch size, but it helps with texture
600 grams blanched almonds
300 grams raw pistachios
Keep Calm and justeffingcook
Clear your schedule. Put your phone on Do Not Disturb. There will be split-second timing and lava-hot sugar all up in here.
Toast your pistachios and almonds lightly in a 350 degree oven. They will toast a bit more in the lava hot sugar, so no need to go overboard.
Decrease oven temp to 250 degrees. Pile all your toasted nuts into one huge-ass metal bowl, and place in oven to keep warm. No going off the rails with “keep my nuts warm” jokes. Stay with the program.
In the bowl of a 6 quart stand mixer with the whisk attachment, mix together 30 grams of sugar with the dried egg whites, add the 2 egg whites, mix a minute or two on medium, and let sit to hydrate.
Melt the butter and set aside.
Place the honey in a small saucepan. Add the corn syrup, sugar, water, and vanilla bean husk to a medium saucepan, preferably one with a lip to balance on the edge of your mixing bowl later.
Here comes the timing part: Cook the honey over high heat with a candy thermometer in place. When it reaches 225 degrees, turn the mixer on to its highest setting to begin whipping the egg whites. Once they foam, add the salt.
When the honey reaches 250 degrees, turn off the heat, transfer the thermometer to the medium saucepan and start cooking the sugar mixture on high heat.
Pour the honey into the whipping egg whites in a slow, steady stream. Leave the whites and honey whipping on high.
When the sugar mixture reaches 280 degrees, turn off the heat, pluck out the vanilla bean, and begin pouring into the whipping mixture in a steady stream.
Add the melted butter. The nougat will fly out of the bowl and paint your walls if you try to do this all at once at full speed, so turn it down a little at first, then go back to high speed as the butter is incorporated.
The mixer may strain a little as you go. Tell it to buck up, it won’t be much longer. Basically, once you have a smooth mixture, add it to the warm bowl of nuts.
Mix with a wooden spoon or stiff silicone spatula. This is hard work and the bowl can be hot, so have a couple of potholders handy. Helpers are good, but I am usually alone, so I use one potholder on the edge of the bowl and brace it against my ribs as I stir.
Have your wafer paper ready, face down on a flat surface like a cutting board or countertop. Pour the nougat mixture onto the center. It won’t be lava-hot at this point, so your countertop should be safe.
Two options: you can press it flat gently with gloved (and lightly oiled) hands and then lay the second piece of wafer paper on top - it will feel hot, so be careful; or you can just go ahead with the wafer paper, knowing it’s not going to get into the corners and will mush a bit more out the sides. I’m personally fine with that - it lends authenticity or whatever.
Take a sheet pan and press gently over the top, encouraging the nougat to flow where you want it to go. You can also take a rolling pin to encourage flow to the corners, but be careful not to put too much downward pressure on the pin, as it will rip the wafer paper. Once the nougat is about 3/4 of an inch thick and reasonably flat, allow it to cool completely.
Find someone to cut it for you while you sip a fine bourbon. Direct your helper to the tips and tricks on cutting, below.
Place the second sheet of wafer on top and gently flatten. Also, isn’t this fucking gorgeous?
Notes on cutting:
The same thing that makes this texture so perfect also makes it hard to cut. The dudes who do this for a living (nougatiers) use a special table saw to cut it, but you don’t have one of those, do you? Damn. Neither do I.
If you press down hard with your knife, it will fracture. Which is fine unless you want it in those delicious little bricks. Which I do.
Use a serrated knife and steady pulling strokes to get through the long cuts. Be patient. Cut crosswise into bite-size pieces. Or two-bites-sized if you are a more delicate nosher.
Those extra bits that you cut off to even up the ends are the property of the person running the knife. They must be eaten as you work or the universe tips out of balance. It’s a science thing.
Notes on Corn Syrup:
Corn syrup is a type of glucose syrup, and is included here for two reasons: it inhibits crystallization of the sugar (sucrose) in solution, and contributes to the texture of the final product. Now, prepare yourself for facts.
You hopefully already know that corn syrup is not high-fructose corn syrup. Nope. Two different products. For HFCS they take a glucose syrup and enzymatically convert some of the glucose to fructose. They do this because fructose is sweeter and therefore more cost-effective in commercial products. It also might be handled differently by the body, but it’s still unclear if it’s worse than the many hidden sugars we consume in our diet.
But I digress.
Here in America, with our amber waves of grain, we have a lot of corn. So the most readily available kind of glucose syrup is corn syrup. In Europe, home bakers will buy “glucose syrup” which might be made from corn, rice, or potatoes. And if you Google enough, you might find “glucose” or “dextrose” syrup from commercial baker’s supply vendors here in the good ol’ US of A. What to do with all these choices? Is there a difference between them all? What the fuck is a DE (dextrose equivalent)?
Glucose is a mono-saccharide with two forms - mirror images of one another, you might say. The L-isomer is uncommon in nature. It tastes the same, but because it is “backwards”, can’t be used by our cells for energy. “They” (the overlords - you know, the same ones who brought us HFCS) once gave it a run as a calorie-free sweetener, but alas, it was super expensive to synthesize. The D-isomer is of glucose is dextrose: the fuel currency of nature. So, are glucose and dextrose the same? Yes-ish.
Glucose syrup is made from the enzymatic hydrolysis of starch, whatever the source. The typical composition will be 20% dextrose, 14% or so maltose (a di-saccharide), and 11% maltotriose (a tri-saccharide). The remainder with be oligosaccharides - in other words, incompletely busted-up starches. The dextrose equivalent - DE - of this kind of syrup is 20.
But you can also get more completely hydrolyzed versions of glucose syrup - typically with a dextrose equivalent of 40. These will be sweeter, but also potentially more consistent for commercial bakers, hence their manufacture.
If you are in a place where your grocery store sells “glucose syrup”, it should be nearly identical to the corn syrup on the shelves in the US. Substitute it 1:1.
If you happen to have glucose syrup with a DE of 40, you might need to play with the recipe a bit. I would start with 300 gm and see how it goes.
Uses:
I usually just wrap the pieces in cello wrap and pack them in boxes to give to friends around the holidays. And eat a shit-ton myself.
Delicious little bastards.
But there are a few other uses to consider. For instance - if you freeze it and shatter it with a mallet, it makes a kick-ass topping for a sundae. Or how about in a semifreddo? Stirred into a cake frosting? Nougat ice cream???
Other thoughts:
You can cut quantities in half without a problem. This recipe is sized for holiday consumption.
My stand mixer holds 6 quarts and has 575 watts of power. A smaller bowl may be too small to safely hold this recipe, so cut back. A wimpier motor will definitely strain, so you may need to switch out to the paddle attachment when in starts whining.
My wafer paper is 15x15in, and while I do have a frame that size, I generally just freestyle it. If you want borders around your nougat, you can put 8x10 wafer paper in a silicone baking pan. If you put it in a metal pan, oil it.
Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm. Good.