Book Review: Tamales: Fast and Delicious Mexican Meals

Well I'm back again with another cookbook review and I couldn't be happier!

Back a million years ago in culinary school we were assigned to make tamales and life was never again the same! Being a lover of Mexican food I have wanted to make tamales again for a long time and to share their rich perfectly creamy, spicy, treasure package selves with the family but something has always prevented me from actually doing it! :) Picking "Tamales: Fast and Delicious Mexican Meals" by Alice Guadalupe Tapp to review was the perfect thing to motivate me to ACTUALLY get to work!

This book is a basic primer on home-making tamale's, the author states form the very beginning that her goal is to make it a dish accessible to every weeknight dinner table and not just something made for special occasions. Her methods in getting from point A to point B may easily labeled un-traditional but in the end get her stated goal across. I made tamales. I made tamales after 10 years of procrastination and excuses. I made tamales and it didn't take all afternoon! That in and of its self is a small miracle for this dish that is known for its labor-intensive process to produce!

My tamale making station!

The book it self is pretty compact and a good size to stash on your counter-top and still have room to work. It has a nice sturdy hardback binding and is wrapped up in really pretty photography of the tamales. There are photos throughout the book, but unfortunately, not one for every recipe which is something I prefer in a cookbook. There are a lot of good tips in the front section of the book on selecting shortcut ingredients, and one on the many ways to wrap the tamales that had very helpful illustrations.

The cooked tamales in the pot.

One beef that I have with the book though is that the one point in tamale making that I had dreaded doing- and screwing up- was making the masa and that was not made any clearer by this book. The page dedicated to explaining the different types of masa is informative- but the opposing page, the one that is a photograph of the kinds of masa is left entirely unlabeled and in that one mistake I feel you loose a huge part of your readership who are using this book to learn about tamale making for the first time and have no idea what they are doing! After reading and using outside research sources (and in the end going with my gut) I figured out what masa recipe I wanted to try based on what I type of masa I thought I had purchased. This deficiency was a big turn off for me in an otherwise solid instructional section.

Overall however, I really liked this book. The recipes look really tasty and range from weird and wonderful, to savory, to sweet and there is sure to be something in this book that makes you get up and say 'Yes! I will make tamales!' In the end that's all it's indented to do. I think that any semi-knowledgeable cook who desire to dazzle and impress without a whole lot of effort will have good success with this book- and a whole lot of fun!  

My finished tamales with a dribble of salsa verde!