The holiday season means togetherness, presents and warming, themed cocktails, but throughout South America and the North American Southwest, you’d better believe it also means tamales—copious, heaping piles of tamales.
You can find these masa-based meals in L.A. throughout the year—steamed in their sleeves of corn husks or banana leaves—but around Christmastime, the tradition is ever-present: Vendors pop up on corners otherwise bereft of tamal stands the rest of the year, while some of the city’s most notable chefs and restaurants offer seasonal catering for the item. Families and friends gather for tamaladas at home, hand-making their own batches. The dish bears religious symbolism, as a staple of the feast day of Our Lady of Guadalupe, but we’re just thrilled to have an excuse to indulge any day.
Stuffings, wraps and salsas vary by region, all making for their own take on the tamal. Chichen Itza’s Yucatán variety leans vaporcitos, long and flat and encased in banana leaf; at Guelaguetza, find theirs thick and blanketed by a Oaxacan mole negro. Peruvian chef Ricardo Zarate, who runs the kitchen of Rosaliné, makes tamales like you’ve never had before.
“I call it Juane tamale,” he says.
Photograph: Stephanie Breijo
Technically, on the menu of his West Hollywood restaurant, it’s the Juane de Chancho: a tamal-adjacent dish that traditionally stuffs a massive banana leaf with rice, masa, olives and egg. But in the kitchen of Zarate, a Lima native, he reimagines this Peruvian Amazon dish as a tamale more like the ones he grew up eating, thinner and full of stewed meat.
“Tamales are generally a South American dish,” Zarate says. “And we all have a different experience.”
Rosaliné’s take is a blend of cultures and tamal tradition, and the end result is stellar: The dish arrives in a large bowl, a mountainous layering of fresh masa, an entire hard-boiled egg, garbanzo beans, a hunk of tender pork ossobuco, a bright and traditional Peruvian salsa criolla, plantain chips, and a sprinkling of toasted-then-salted cancha, or corn kernels.
First he blanches hearty Peruvian choclo corn, then blends it to make a paste, adding a cilantro-and-beer sauce to the masa as he goes. The mash is then cooked lightly on the stove, and while it cools, Zarate softens two sizable banana leaves over an open flame. He lays them flat on a counter, then spoons the thick choclo masa to form a bed for the tamal.
A hard-boiled egg—“very Peruvian”—gets cozy next to the ossobuco, which already stewed for three or four hours in a sauce of ginger, garlic, cilantro, chicken stock, ají panca and ají amarillo. A handful of whole chickpeas adds texture, and the reduced ossobuco sauce gets poured over the the mix to keep everything moist. Then Zarate wraps it all in banana leaves, then encloses that in aluminum foil before steaming the parcel for roughly 20 minutes.
Photograph: Stephanie Breijo
For the garnish, he makes a salsa criolla, a citrus-forward blend of onions and cilantro, akin to pico de gallo. Made and mixed right away, high in acidity, it tops the opened tamale to cut through the fattiness of the pork—and looks beautiful in the process.
While Zarate’s tamal can be found at Rosaliné year-round, there’s never been a better time to seek it out—although you could always go the chef’s route and make your own tamales at home.
“The good thing about tamales is you can do it with any flavor you want, and they’re easy to wrap,” he says. “[Traditionally] these dishes were made with leftovers and whatever was around. So at Christmas, you can even make them using leftovers—maybe you could do like a gravy and turkey tamal. It’s easy.”
Sounds like a plan to us. But we’ll still be stopping by for more Juane de Chancho.
Photograph: Stephanie Breijo
Photograph: Stephanie Breijo
Find Zarate’s Juane de Chancho ($34) on the menu at Rosaliné, located at 8479 Melrose Avenue in West Hollywood.