Transcripts

BIANCA VAZQUEZ TONESS: La Loma is a tamale kitchen in South Minneapolis. If you've eaten a restaurant tamale in the Twin Cities, it may have come from this kitchen. The owners, Enrique and Noelia Garcia, make almost a dozen different kinds of tamales.

ENRIQUE GARCIA: With pork, chicken, vegetable, sweet with the corn, pineapple, raisin, one time, we do one with the beans inside.

BIANCA VAZQUEZ TONESS: Making tamales is arduous, even when you have electricity and fancy equipment. Turning fresh corn into dough, or masa, takes the most time.

ENRIQUE GARCIA: It's a cooking time for the corn.

BIANCA VAZQUEZ TONESS: Enrique stands in front of a tank where they boil about 200 pounds of corn with lime to remove its hard shell.

ENRIQUE GARCIA: So we cook the corn right here and leave it overnight. The next day, we wash, make sure all the lime get out of the corn, and we store it.

BIANCA VAZQUEZ TONESS: They dry the corn in a refrigerator for about 24 hours. Once it's dry, they grind it by machine into flour. They use another machine to mix the flour with lard and a red sauce made from red chilies. The process from start to finish is long. And it doesn't even include making the filling. Even so, the Garcias make about 13,000 tamales a week. Soon, they plan to make that many each day to sell to grocery stores. How is that possible? We'll get to that.

Enrique and Noelia are modest about their success. They say it took a lot of hard work, especially since they started with so little. They got married when they were only 17 and 18 years old. Two days later, they left their small town in Mexico for the States.

ENRIQUE GARCIA: We got the idea that we're going to come, one year or two years, and we're going to be rich. [LAUGHS] But it's not that way. I was working for an Italian restaurant for about four years. I worked for a Tex-Mex restaurant about two years, and then worked for a French restaurant for about two, three years. But I never cooked Mexican food. When I get in Minnesota, I don't even have to cook anything, nothing. So in Mexico, the men, they don't cook. Go to work and that's it. You don't get anything in the kitchen.

BIANCA VAZQUEZ TONESS: One day, about six years ago, Enrique and Noelia made tamales at home and took them for lunch. Their coworkers liked them so much, they wanted to buy them. So the Garcias rented a small table and two burners in a commercial kitchen and eventually took over the entire kitchen. Soon, they were making a lot of tamales.

ENRIQUE GARCIA: But we never know that we need a license to do that. So we get in trouble. After three years, we get in trouble because we're doing wholesale, we have no license.

BIANCA VAZQUEZ TONESS: The Garcias took the required classes and finally got their license. That wasn't the only homework they had to do. Noelia spent months researching and refining each recipe they use. But there was one recipe that came easier than the others. That's because it was her mother's. Noelia's mom had a tamale business. And as a girl, Noelia sold them around town.

NOELIA GARCIA: She put the tamales in a little basket or bucket, with a serviette on top, napkin. And we go house by house and offer tamales.

BIANCA VAZQUEZ TONESS: Once the workers had prepared the chicken and the masa, or dough, they're ready to put together the tamales. This is one of the last steps they still do by hand. Its assembly line style. About half a dozen people stand around a long table. One person pulls out a banana leaf, the next puts on the masa, or dough. Then the chicken fried in red chili sauce goes on top. The last person wraps it up. But all that may change.

The Garcias want to make five times as many tamales as they do now. A new machine may help with the assembly. But it's not a sure thing yet. They'll only buy the new equipment if it doesn't change the quality of their tamales. They want their tamales to taste the same next year as they did six years ago, when they made the tamales with their own hands in a tiny rented kitchen. I'm Bianca Vazquez Toness, Minnesota Public Radio.