Tamales-Preparing the Corn Husks & Masa

Merrilee Jacobs: Hi! I am Merrilee Jacobs, Founder and CEO of 3 Hot Tamales, and today I am showing you how to make tamales. Right now, I am going to show you how to prepare corn husk a mix your masa. The corn husk come dried, so you need to get them moist enough to be flexible before when you rolling them. So you put them in a bowl, cover them with a little water, warm preferably and let them soak for about 20 minutes which gives you a plenty enough time to start mixing your masa. Now when you go to mixture masa, the ingredients again are the corn masa flour, oil and water, some seasonings, baking powder and salts. I've mixed up measured out here six cups of corn masa flour, I have got two-and-a-half tablespoons of a vegetarian chicken seasoning or a regular chicken seasoning you can use, one-and-a-half teaspoons of salt and one teaspoon of baking powder. This will help your masa to be nice and fluffy. Mix those up a little bit and then we add our six-and-a-half cups of water and a-half-cup of salsa verde and one cup of vegetable oil. As you are mixing this, you'll notice that the corn masa flour seems to absorb a lot of moisture. So you may have to add a little bit more depending on the consistency of it, just to mix real well and before too long you are going to have a nice kind of soft paste. It starts to get a little thicker as you mix it, corn masa flour absorbs the moisture, make sure you get out all the lumps and you have a nice soft paste. Now that we have mixed this masa for a while, you can see that it's absorbed the water to form the nice soft paste. Now that we've showed you how to prep our corn husk and mix our masa, the next thing we are going to teach you is how to make a red chili sauce to go with your beef tamales.