I love a recipe that uses lots of produce. I get excited when the bulk of the ingredients are fresh, which means I'll be able to do the type of vegetable cooking I'm used to.
Guatemala celebrates their Revolution Day on October 20th. I had planned to make this dish on that day, but ended up doing it early, since I will be in Montreal this weekend, and it's harder to cook things for this project from an Airbnb (not impossible, though!) This dish is called chuchitos, which are very similar to Mexican tamales.
The first step is making the sauce. Lots of tomato, some onion, garlic, a couple tomatillos, and some chilis all go into a pan to dry roast.
While the veggies roasted, I toasted some pumpkin seeds with dried chili flakes.
The vegetables all went into the blender to make a thin sauce.
And the pumpkin seeds went into a spice grinder along with some roasted sesame seeds.
The ground seeds were then mixed in with the sauce to thicken it, then that sauce simmered on the stove while I prepared the masa dough.
The dough included masa (corn flour), water, and lots of butter. My dough was not as thin as it should have been, so next time I make anything like tamales I'll know to add more water so that it doesn't crack when I try to wrap them.
To assemble the chuchitos, the dough is normally spread onto a corn husk. Since I didn't have any corn husks, I had to make do with parchment paper. The filling can be made with various ingredients (even raisins!) but most recipes I saw used shredded chicken. Since I didn't read the recipe fully before going shopping for ingredients, I didn't have anything that could stand in for the chicken, but I did have more of the veggie beef crumbles that I used for the tourtiere for Canada.
On top of the dough, I placed some of the crumbles and a spoonful of the sauce. When I started with the first few ones, I got discouraged by the fact that the sauce seemed to just run all over the place rather than stay inside the pocket of dough. Pinching the dough together without getting the filling squirting out was no easy task. However, when I watched a video of them being made (after I had assembled all of them, of course) it looked like that was how they were supposed to be made. I think the liquid sauce helps flavor and moisten the masa a bit more.
Once all the parchment paper packets were wrapped and secured, they steamed on the stove for about an hour until the dough firmed up. I was pleasantly surprised that my makeshift corn husks actually worked so well! Husks are a lot more porous than parchment paper, so they probably help the chuchitos cook faster while remaining fairly moist.
The chuchitos are served with more of the sauce (the recipe made a LOT of sauce) and are sometimes eaten with crumbled or shredded cheese on top.
Since it was so difficult to wrap the pouches with more than a tiny bit of filling, I also had a ton of the crumbles left over as well, so I served the chuchitos with a scoop of those as well. I was afraid the chuchitos wouldn't be enough to eat for dinner, especially since it took me so long to make them (we ended up eating at 8pm) but with the corn flour dough they were actually very filling.
I have a newfound respect for those that are talented at making tamales. It took me three hours and a lot of frustration to finish these. And apparently these are supposed to be easier to make than Mexican tamales! The ones I made were decent; with a few tweaks I think I would enjoy them a lot more, but as they are they're not half bad!
Recipes Used: Chuchitos (an various others)
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