Food, Home & Lifestyle
Tamales de Guayaba | Guava Tamales
Lesson time 25:32 min
Using the masa made earlier in the class, Gabriela teaches you how to make dessert tamales with a guava filling.
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Topics include: Guava Compote · Preparing the Dough · Building the Tamales · Steaming the Tamales · Serving the Tamales
Teaches Mexican Cooking
Celebrated chef Gabriela Cámara shares her approach to making Mexican food that brings people together: simple ingredients, exceptional care.
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[MUSIC PLAYING] - So now I'm going to teach you how to make one of the super basic Mexican dishes, which is a tamale. And in this case, I'm going to make a sweet tamale. Tamales are basically masa-- corn masa-- that you prepare in different ways. You add fat, lard, usually. You add sugar, or salt, or sauce, or chicken broth, or pork broth. There are so many ways to make tamales. And usually, you have a filling for a tamale. And then you-- either with a corn husk or with a banana leaf, you wrap it up. And there are very different-- there are many, many different tamales throughout Mexico. And a tamale is a meal in itself. It's a little wrapped meal that you can have at a party. You don't need dishes to eat it, because you have the husk or the banana leaf to eat it on. And I am going to teach you one of my favorite tamales, which is a guava tamale. [MUSIC PLAYING] This is a guava. Guavas are a very fragrant, very typical fruit of the Mexican winter. You use it in tamales, in atole, in different preparations, because it's fragrant. It's a fruit that is sometimes difficult to eat because of all the seeds inside. But here, I want to show you a trick for eating them. And you have yellow guavas. And then you also have these beautiful pink guavas that are really a party of color in here. And they both have the seeds. But you see the difference between these two. And we're going to combine these two in our tamales, just for the sake of showing you that you could use either, both. Here we go. And it's sweetened with piloncillo, which is cane sugar. And I'm going to add canela. And I'm going to put this in our fire to begin with. I want to start this fire with a little bit of water. I want this at high heat. And then, when it starts boiling, we will lower it. I am going to start that off as I cut my guavas. Guavas are best eaten when you pick them from a tree. Usually, guavas are sold by small vendors in markets. They're not a large crop fruit of Mexico. I am going to mix this piloncillo. Now it's about to boil. So I'm just going to lower it so that it doesn't boil on me while I am putting the guava insides. I'm scooping out all the parts that have-- all the part that has the seeds. And I'm leaving the hard sort of shell. It isn't very hard. So you have to be very careful with this fruit. Because we're going to use the skin for texture in the tamale. We're going to make a syrup with this, with the inside of the guava, with both the pink and the yellow guavas. There are so many different types of tamales, depending on what part of Mexico you're in. The guava tamales are for sure a seasonal tamale. It's wintry. But you can substitute guavas for apples, pineapple, any fruit that you might have-- you know, for sure, berries, for sure, strawberries. There are so many easy fruits to put in a tamale. OK, so here, we're making guava compote with the insides of the guava. We're going to make sure that t...
About the Instructor
A “star of modern Mexican cuisine,” Gabriela Cámara brings her local, sustainable twist to time-honored traditions. Now the chef of Contramar shares the richness of her culture through the art of food. Learn step-by-step recipes—for dishes of her own design, like tuna tostadas, and staples like tacos al pastor, salsa, and tortillas—and delight loved ones with your own delicious renditions of Mexican favorites.
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Gabriela Cámara
Celebrated chef Gabriela Cámara shares her approach to making Mexican food that brings people together: simple ingredients, exceptional care.
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