Have you ever steamed Tamales in a rice cooker? Cooking a traditional Mesoamerican dish known as Tamales usually requires special equipment called a steamer. The dish itself is made up of dough that needs to be steamed in a banana leaf. most people also use corn husk during steaming. But how to steam tamales in a rice cooker if you don’t have a steamer?
Here in this article, we are going to see how to steam cook tamales in a rice cooker.
How To Steam Tamales In A Rice Cooker?
Steam Cooking Tamales In A Rice Cooker
The process of cooking tamales mainly depends upon the equipment that you are using. If you are using a steamer you can go along and follow that usual recipe of steaming tamales in a steamer. The specific steamer meant for steaming tamales in it is called tamalero. It is designed especially for cooking tamales.
But if you don’t have a tamalero, you can still steam tamales in a rice cooker. The one-way simple method that you can use to make tamales in a rice cooker from scratch is easy. Just follow the steps below:
Method Of Steam Cooking Tamales In A Rice Cooker
You simply need to follow the given instructions step by step and you can easily steam tamales in a rice cooker.
- As you know, cooking tamales is a heavy job, you need to pick out the largest pot that you have at the moment from your cupboard. A pot that can fit tamales in it completely.
- Now, place the steam bucket inside the large cooler and put the equipment on the stove.
- Set the equipment to steam just like you do with your normal stovetop steaming rig.
- Now, all there’s left to do is put oil inside and start placing your tamales inside the steam bucket. The bigger the tamale is, the more space would it take. Therefore, try to make smaller tamales so that they would easily fit inside your rice cooker.
Note: An instant cooker of large size works perfectly fine for steam cooking tamales. You can also store your tamales in the freezer and cook them further whenever you are in the mood to eat hot tamales.
Reheating Tamales
After taking out the frozen tamales, reheating then at a proper temperature is very necessary. Simply, fill the pot with water and place a small batch of tamales in the steam bucket. Now, steam them until they’re hot and ready to eat.
The pan of the rice cooker is very small and kind of flat. This is why steaming tamales in it would be a hell of a difficult job. You have to make sure that the water stays only in the pot and tamales should not touch the boiling hot water but only be steamed by it.
Conclusion
So, how to steam tamales in a rice cooker? A simple answer would be a “You can’t”, but obviously you can make it work if you lack other options such as a proper steamer.