Instant Pot Tamales

I’m a transplant from Texas, and tamales are near to my heart.

Among their many gifts, tamales are successful as leftovers, festive for parties, and they excel as an all-in-one meal that allows busy people to get nourished while tending to other stuff. Like sandwiches and pizza and pasties.

And just like a great homemade pizza, tamales are way better and way healthier when you make them out of excellent ingredients, at home.

They’re also fun to prepare while dancing in the kitchen to good music with your loved ones.

This tamale recipe features soup chickens. Before the mid-20th century, all chickens were soup chickens. Today, you and maybe nobody else you know has ever even heard of them. At our house, the highest and best tamale ingredient is a flavorful, protein-rich soup chicken.

This recipe makes approximately 2 dozen tamales. If you have extra dough left over at the end, either roll them up as plain tamales with no filling, or fill them with a baton of sharp cheddar. Delicious.

And here's an excellent meatless version for my vegans. 

Dough Ingredients

5 cups of blue corn masa (or white, or yellow)

5 cups of broth from a soup chicken

2 tsp sea salt

2 tsp baking powder

1 teaspoon dried Mexican oregano

Chicken Filling

About 2 cups of cooked meat from one soup chicken, chopped finely

2 cups of your favorite salsa

1 teaspoon dried chile powder

1/2 cup leaf lard (or your favorite cooking fat)

Process

Cook the soup chicken in a crock pot or Instant Pot until tender. My go-to Instant Pot soup chicken time is 130 minutes. The meat should fall off the bone—no hint of toughness. If you’re using a crock pot, you’re going for 5 hours minimum.

Strain the broth from the chicken and set it aside.

Separate out the meat and chop or shred it finely. Stir the chopped meat with salsa and chile powder. It should resemble chunky salsa.

Mix the masa and broth to make tamale dough. It should be very wet, more like muffin batter than bread dough. If your dough isn’t rather goopy, the tamales will be dry.

Soak the tamale husks in warm water for at least 30 minutes. Tear them into strips about 5” wide. Tear any remainders into quarter-inch strips. You’ll use these as belts for the tamales.

Watching this video might help if you’ve never assembled tamales before. (Skip to about 4 minutes 30 seconds in.)

When all your ingredients are prepped and ready to go, place the wide end of a soaked tamale husk before you. Grab a big heaping spoon of tamale dough and paste it onto the husk. The dough should cover an area roughly the size of a piece of buttered toast. Drop a spoonful or two of the chicken and salsa mixture into the center, then roll and fold the thing up tamale-style. Belt the whole thing up with a granny knot and set it in a steamer basket in your Instant Pot, open end up.

If you’re doing this on a stove burner, you still want a steamer basket. You’ll need to steam them for an hour and a half using a traditional pot. (You’ll want to test the dough for tenderness to make sure they’re done.)

When all the tamales are rolled and formed and ready to go, add a couple cups of water to the bottom of the pot, close the lid, and steam the tamales for 30 minutes in your Instant Pot.

Makes about 24 tamales. Tamales freeze well, so double or triple away.