Honest question: Do you know if your favorite local tamales are made from the painstaking, thousand-year-old nixtamal masa process? Or are they made from the much more convenient Maseca (instant masa flour)?
For some of us, this keen distinction is everything due to the absolutely different values in food politics they stand for. The former tends to produce rustic tamales that are tender-to-the-bite. The latter technique produces smoother tamales that are cakey, or as Long Beach tamalero Ramon Martinez says in Español, “the kinds of tamales you can’t eat on their own and need a drink to wash it down.”
Most tamales found in the streets of Los Angeles are made with Maseca, due to this “masa harina,” as it is called, being about ten times cheaper than nixtamal. It is also much faster to assemble and cook. All this makes Martinez’s tamales—made from the even harder-to-find masa quebrada (a coarser grind of masa), all the more honorable and special. The grind for broken masa leaves some of the nixtamalized field chunkier; imagine a savory cake made from grits.
Ramon is from Honduras, and his wife, Andrea Martinez, comes from Veracruz, Mexico. They have both been making tamales proudly from nixtamal-only (many other tamalerías also mix the two masas) to sell in the parking lot of The Home Depot on Cherry Avenue in Signal Hill since 2017.
Andrea’s tamales will stop you in your tracks.