Tamales at the California-based Vallarta Supermarkets chain. | Vallarta Supermarkets
For Mexican restaurants and supermarkets, the holidays mean one thing: Tamal season is here
It wasn’t until I moved to New York City for college that I realized how much I took the tamales of my childhood holidays for granted. A born-and-raised Southern Californian with a big Mexican American family, I had never known a Christmas without a pile of corn husk-wrapped tamales waiting next to a honey ham and the half dozen other sides my mom and aunts had prepared for us, the corn masa hot and inviting, begging us to dig in. We picked and chose our holiday traditions — I can’t remember the last time my parents successfully corralled my siblings and me to the procession-and-caroling part of a posada celebration — but we always had tamales.
What I didn’t have that first year in New York was a plane ticket back to Los Angeles. So, 18 and desperately homesick, I trudged out to Sunset Park, Brooklyn, from the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where a growing Mexican enclave has taken root. I wandered around until I found a street vendor braving the cold to sell her tamales. All she had left by that time of day were tamales de chicharron. I bought five, and stashed them in my dorm room freezer, thawing them one by one for dinner. They were delicious.
In the years since, I’ve found other tamaleras in other parts of the city. I’ve bought one-off tamales for convenient breakfast options before hopping on the subway, and pre-ordered 40 at a time for Friendsgiving gatherings. Because while many Mexican American households also have turkey on Thanksgiving, and a ham for Christmas, many tables all but require a plate laden with piping hot, freshly steamed tamales.
“Tamales are the epitome of a celebration food, and they’re a necessity for New Year’s, for posadas, for the Christmas table,” says Pati Jinich, a chef, author, and the host of La Frontera on PBS. “They’re seen as these beautiful, edible gifts because they’re wrapped and they have deep meaning since ancestral times.”
For those of us who may be thousands of miles away from our families’ homemade tamales, we turn to other options to satisfy the craving when it strikes. Businesses big and small — from restaurants plating pillowy tamales in the center of a thick and complex mole negro to the tamalera who sells her homemade wares at a makeshift stand on the corner — have found ways to fill a void, especially between Thanksgiving and New Year’s, when demand explodes.
For the Texas Tamale Company, Christmas comes early every year. The Houston-based frozen tamale company — which got its start as a food cart, then a restaurant — begins stockpiling batches of its tamales in late spring and early summer in anticipation of the holiday rush, explains Loralie Holly, the firm’s vice president of sales and marketing. Over time, staff will increase from 12 people year-round to about 20 by December. And the single packaging line, which can typically handle the steady stream of online orders year-round, won’t cut it: Texas Tamale needs four or five such lines to account for the people buying dozens of tamales for themselves and as gifts.
In November alone, customers hungry for a Texas-style tamal will purchase 165,000 sets of a dozen tamales. In December, the company is bracing to move 280,000 dozens. That’s more than 5.3 million individual tamales over the course of two months.
“Once November hits — or really, that first cold snap that you get in Texas and elsewhere in October — is when people start to get the itch for tamales,” Holly says. And the Texas Tamale Company, which also sells its corn husk-wrapped packages of masa and fillings in grocery stores across the country, is waiting to mail them a taste of the holidays.
Tamales are a staple of Mexican and other Latin American food cultures, stretching back to Indigenous Mesoamerican peoples. They’re composed of a dough-like masa that is spread across a soaked wrapper, like corn husks, banana leaves, or a peppery plant called hoja santa; filled with any variety of protein; and then folded into a fat envelope or cigar shape and steam-cooked. In their final form, they’re convenient as a handheld meal on the go, as portable as a Hot Pocket but infinitely less filled with goo as hot as the earth’s core; and customizable. Typical fillings include salsa verde and chicken; red chile and beef; a green chile pepper-and-cheese mixture known as rajas; and chicharrones — crispy fried pig skins that become chewy at the tamal’s center. Sweeter variations include tamales filled with strawberries, pineapple, or raisins, for either a fluffy dessert or to satisfy that one person who just has to have a little something sweet to accompany any meal.
Jacob Leaf
Tamales at Frontera Grill.
Jacob Leaf
María García, the principal tamalera at Chicago’s Frontera Grill, shows off a recent batch.
But tamales are also time-consuming to make, and based on my father’s childhood memories of being conscripted into the kitchen for holiday prep, extremely labor-intensive. Each batch of masa — the ground, nixtamalized corn used to form the base of a tamal — requires minutes of continuous kneading so the texture is just right. The masa used for tamales is coarse-ground and contains lard and seasonings, while the masa used for making tortillas call for a smoother texture and are free of lard and spices. The fillings and salsas that serve as the primary flavor can take hours to prepare, too. To get the hefty task completed, a tamalada — a party where several people gather around the table and assemble dozens or even hundreds of tamales at a time for the household — is common practice.
For María García, the principal tamalera at Frontera Grill in Chicago, making tamales for the restaurant’s holiday shipping is business as usual. A 25-year veteran of Frontera, she applies the traditions her grandmother taught her in her home state of Guerrero, Mexico, to her process of kneading water into the masa so it has the right consistency, as well as the flavors developed by the restaurant’s team. She’ll ramp up the number of tamales she makes each week as the holidays draw near, and other Frontera staff will help out, but for García, the work is a labor of love.
“My mother and grandmother loved to make tamales so much, and every holiday, I’d watch and begin to help them little by little,” García explains in Spanish. “It made me so happy when my grandmother taught me how to make them because she was already older by then, so I took advantage of the time I could be with her and my mother.”
Now, she makes the tamales on the Frontera menu year-round for patrons, as well as thousands of additional tamales for customers on the online food retail site Goldbelly between Thanksgiving and Christmas alone. The restaurant joined the platform during the pandemic, and while it only provided a 1 or 2 percent boost in sales, culinary director Zach Steen explains that’s enough to make a difference. During a non-holiday week, Frontera orders 20 to 40 pounds of masa from a local farm to make the tamales and tortillas it serves to restaurant patrons; ahead of Thanksgiving and Christmas, that order skyrockets to 120 pounds per week.
Still, García can keep up. Bayless, an early adopter in the effort of showcasing the vast culinary diversity of Mexican cuisine to American audiences, calls her a “wizard,” and Steen marvels at her process, which includes prepping batches of 100 tamales into Frontera’s industrial steamer so they can cook in 40 minutes.
“I would love to tell you the story of María toiling over the steamer, but honestly, she’s so amazing,” says Steen. “She doesn’t work any more hours, and she just increases her output. I tell her, ‘Okay, María, it’s Goldbelly season. I have 150 orders the next few weeks, and she just goes, ‘Okay, no problem.’”
Vallarta Supermarkets
Hatch chile tamales at Vallarta Supermarkets.
Meanwhile at the Tucson Tamale Company, the freezer is always stocked. The firm — which also sells its wares retail in supermarkets under the brand Tucson Foods — keeps an estimated 10,000 tamales in its freezer at any point in time during the holiday season, says general manager Frank Ruiz. Between November and March, the company sells 30,000, and in flavors ranging from green chile and cheese, and beef with salsa roja, to unique seasonal offerings like turkey cranberry as well as sweet pumpkin.
“Traditionally, Southern Arizona is a huge place for tamales, and everybody and their mom makes them out here,” says Ruiz, who notes that most customers typically buy dozens of tamales at a time. “Tamales are also really hard work, and the older generation isn’t really around to make them anymore. So that’s where we step in, and we do it for them.”
While store-bought tamales can help harried households who lack time for a tamalada, or capture a tradition that may have been lost to assimilation, they can also serve as reminders of home for the Latine immigrant community that may not have the ability to travel to their homelands during tamal season. That’s where Latino-serving grocery options, such as California-based chain Vallarta Supermarkets help to fill a void, says Lizette Gomez, Vallarta’s director of marketing.
“A lot of our products are catered to a first generation that can’t go home and get something, so we like to bring ‘home’ here,” says Gomez. “I can’t go to [Los Angeles-based supermarket] Ralphs and buy some bomb tamales that I want to eat. I go to a more traditional Hispanic food store where I can find what I need.”
Which is not to say that the Vallarta Supermarkets team, including director of culinary German Gonzalez, is stuck on tradition. In addition to offering tamales filled with chicken, pork, rajas, and hatch chiles, Vallarta began selling pumpkin spice tamales last year as a seasonal treat — a flavor so popular, the chain brought it back for the 2024 season. The chain’s chefs develop the flavors, which are then produced by a facility that services all 55 Vallarta Markets, each of which has a rotisserie chicken-style kiosk dedicated to keeping tamales warm. In total, the markets sell more than 2.5 million tamales each year, and store managers coordinate with each other to ensure they don’t run out during the holiday season.
For her part, Jinich, the chef and TV host, is all for embracing new and inventive flavors of tamales. “I love embracing tradition and passing on the classics so our dishes continue to be made and they tie generations together,” she says. “But I also think that if a cuisine doesn’t get fresh air, it gets kind of… cardboard. As long as we’re honoring and respecting generations-long traditions and techniques that have been passed down, I think people should play and try new things. Why not?”
One tradition she won’t give up is making her family’s holiday tamales herself, and she recommends that people try to make their own at home at least once, particularly due to the communal nature of a tamalada. Such events also ensure that everyone in the community has tamales on hand for Christmas, New Year’s, and any other festivities.
“The idea is that everybody also has tamales to take to their own home,” says Jinich.
Ella Cerón is a writer and editor based in New York. Her first novel, Viva Lola Espinoza, was released in 2023.
