Making tamales this week with home grown corn. About 20% is Glass Gem corn we grew in my yard a couple years ago, and 80% is Wapsie Valley grown on an apple orchard in Maine by my friend Ben (@fiveio) .
We nixtamalize with 1% by mass calcium hydroxide (lime), wash most of the skins off, then grind moist with a hand cranked meat grinder.
For filling we always do black bean since the kids like that best and pretty much everyone can eat it. This time I grilled some chicken thighs and combined them with some nice homemade chili sauce. Also made some with kimchi and leftover bbq pork and some kimchi and fried chicken. I still need to finish off the bean ones but if I have masa left over I may try a few dessert tamales with brown sugar, cinnamon, and dark chocolate.
All the savory tamales get a healthy dose of jack cheese inside. The wrappings are corn husks I got off amazon (home grown ones are too small). I steam them for 50 minutes, cool, then freeze in ziploc bags. My pot holds about 20 tamales per load. They make awesome quick meals; toss in the steamer direct from the freezer and they are ready to eat in about 20 minutes. During that time you can make some guacamole or salad or something else to go with them.
Hi Holly. I just bought some ‘Glass Gem’ seeds because the ears of corn looked, well, beautiful! Do they really look like the pictures? Yours seems to have a lot of yellow. Thanks.
Well, my veggies never look as good as the pictures but Glass Gem was very pretty looking on the cobs. Here are some pics from fall 2018 when we picked this corn.
It is a flint corn, but we found it didn’t pop all that well. It is hard to grind dry (normal for flint types). It is good for nixtamalizing though and has a nice flavor that way.
The reason you see all that yellow corn in my pictures is from the Wapsie Valley, which composed 4/5 of what we used this time. Plus you are seeing post-nixtamalized so all the red Wapsie and most of the colors of the Glass Gem turn kind of black.
Here is the Wapsie the year it was harvested (2017):
Wapsie is a dent corn and is easier to grind dry for cornbread, etc. It has a really harsh feeling cob which will rip up your hands if you shell it bare handed. Fortunately I had bought an antique cast iron sheller from ebay and fixed it up. We hooked it to a bicycle and it made short work of a lot of this corn.
Thanks so much Holly. If I steam the Glass Gem corn I would imagine the color would change. Which is your favorite corn to grow for popping? That I would love to try, I thought Glass Gem would pop. Your ears are beautiful.
It does pop a little bit, but probably 1/10 the volume of commercial popcorn. It is still good to eat but pretty hard to chew. I’ll eat it but my family won’t. I have yet to have strong success with home grown popcorn, though I have grown a couple different kinds. Maybe it is a humidity/moisture content thing.
The best popcorn I have done was Amish Butter. However, it did not pop that well the first year. We harvested it in fall after letting it dry on the plants, let it dry some more inside for a month or so, then picked it off and popped it. We only did about half the cobs though and I hung up the other ones for decorations in the kitchen. About 6 months later we took them down and I put them in the closet until I could get around to shelling them. A full year later we did shell them, and to our surprise they popped quite well! My daughter thinks it must be the one year aging period in the closet.
There is definitely an optimum moisture content for popcorn. You can measure this with small samples by weighing them before and after a dehydration bake. If I were more serious I would develop along measuring and adjusting moisture content in the dry corn. But I’m pretty happy eating it in other ways so I have not put in a lot of work there.
Thanks Again. I can buy corn seeds through French Amazon , they sell American varieties. Corn is only grown here for feed. The French have not a clue about our Gourmet sweet corn varieties, so I will grow my own. To pop for winter and for cooking during the summer! Your Tamales looked sensational!
Red Pontiac Potato aren’t exactly fruit but I took these out of the mulch A few in the skillet and the little ones I willl try to sprout for my second planting . 07/22/21 in Seattle burbs our season for rootcrops here goes until mid November
I ate my first large Marmande tomatoes that had the best taste. True summer tomato taste without a lot of acid. And a rich deep red color. Ate the with homemade buffaloe mozzarella (a woman here makes it).
This weekend I made some stir fried kale with garlic from the garden. Kale was a mix of Thousand Head and Nero de Toscana. Seasoned with oyster sauce and some tamari.
Roasted some Ailsa Craig onions with olive oil and salt.
Made a strawberry cream cake using what I call “Yardberry Jam” from last year. It is a mix of various raspberries, blackberries, currants, gooseberries, and cornelian cherries from throughout the year. If things are not good enough to get eaten fresh they go into a ziplock in the freezer, then when enough has built up I cook it all down into jam and freeze in portions. You can see the dark jam layer on each inside face of the cake layers. Good way to use up a whole jar of jam!
Sure! They are pretty straightforward especially if you have some experience baking cakes. I’ve been making a nice sponge cake recipe the last couple years which I originally got from youtube:
My family likes light and fluffy, not too sweet, asian style cakes (usually with fruit and cream). I have a bigger pan so I scaled the recipe to fill up my pan to a depth I like. Here is my spreadsheet to scale the recipe:
Last friday I made a pretty awesome version of this recipe as a coffee/walnut variation. I dissolved 1tsp Medaglia d’Oro instant espresso in the milk before making the cake. Then I made a batch of swiss meringue buttercream with 227g butter, 1cup sugar, 2 egg whites. I dissolved 15ml instant espresso in a little water and vanilla and beat that in to make coffee buttercream. Then I roasted about 3 cups walnuts and chopped them up. I applied the frosting to the cake in flat form, then the walnuts, then rolled it up.
It wasn’t all that pretty but it was delicious. I was inspired to make it by a similar roll cake we bought from H Mart one time but that they usually don’t have in stock.
For the strawberry cream cake I showed above I cooked just the plain version of the scaled cake recipe (without coffee added). Then I partly froze the cake and cut it into quarters. These flat pieces got coated in jam and layered with cream filling and strawberries. Then I froze the cake for about 15 minutes and trimmed the edges. These days I like to use mascarpone to stabilize whipped cream. For that cake I used 2 cups of cream, to which I added 2 tablespoons sugar and 2 teaspoons vanilla. I used about 2/3 cup mascarpone to stabilize. I found that if you just drop the cheese into the whipped cream it does not get smooth and makes chunks. So I use a hand beater to mix up the cheese with about 1/2 cup of cream in a separate bowl. When the main cream is about 80% whipped I add the cheese/cream and finish whipping. I’ve heard you can do this with cream cheese too but I like mascarpone better; richer and creamier but not as tangy.
Baby Crawford peach (too late to take a pic). One fruit from a last year graft (@Girly’s scions). Brix was around 18. My daughter was so hooked that she was disappointed that we didn’t have more. This was her first peach too! It’s also a favorite among the CRFG members and I can see why. Hopefully I can get good growth this year and enough chill next to produce more.
been eating/ freezing a bunch of acc eden , cascade gold, royalty and another red that was supposed to be joan j but it has thorns. dewberry is starting to ripen and is very tasty with a different zing than blackberries. jeanne gooseberry didnt set heavy as i pruned out the branches that were laying on the ground last year but the ones i got were near quarter sized. all my black currants are due to be picked. cant keep up with all the mara des bois and alpine strawberries ripening. have been eating some lettuce, cukes and baby carrots i thinned from the patch.
I had tomatoes, okra, blueberries and strawberries… yesterday hit my Illini blackberry patch and ate lots of very good berries… we had a lot of rain in july… and they will produce into August when that happens. Still bagging them… but still eating them too. Worth it.
Today, I picked a fruit off Baby Crawford’s seedling, Kit Donnel. Same as B/C, it was grafted last year. The fruit could have used a few more days. It has more acid than BC and the brix was already at 19. Definitely a keeper.
