Can you even travel to Mexico without eating tamales?! As much as Tyler wanted us to attempt making them I just couldn't wrap my head around that endeavor and decided we'd leave it to the pros. The pros in this case is a famous local tamale restaurant, The Tamale Store.
A few years back we wanted to get tamales for Christmas Eve and when I asked around for the best place to get them, that was pretty much the unanimous answer and they're not wrong! Their special Christmas tamales are my favorite, but they're not available this time of year. They have all kinds of other delicious flavors though.
We opted for Chicken Chipotle, Chicken Mole, and Pork Red Chile. You can email them your order and when you'd like to pick them up and then just go get them, which was the highlight of the experience! I'd never been in there before, but there's a restaurant and inside of that a cute little Mercado with grab and go tamales, salsas, treats, and all kinds of good stuff. I asked the guy helping me if he had any favorite treats I should get and he was so sweet! He went through most of the sweets telling me about them and how he likes them and that they're "so so good!". I explained I wanted something to share with my 3 year old and he was conscious of avoiding anything too hard or chewy. He also ran me through the hot sauces and salsas. I ended up adding on Pumpkin Tamales, and his favorite candies pictured below, as well as their in house Salsa Roja. We got to talking about why I was picking up tamales and he thought this was such a fin, great idea. It was such a great interaction especially since I rarely leave the house these days. I was very impressed with their service!
Okay okay, onto the actual food. We started out with chips and salsa. The Salsa Roja is amazing! Slightly smoked flavor which I love - Tyler has deemed it his new favorite salsa! Then we warmed up the tamales. There's several ways you can do that, but the most traditional seems to be steaming them. Unfortunately, it wasn't working well for us so we switched over to the microwave option which was perfect. My favorite was the Chicken Mole as I'm a sucker for a mole sauce. Tyler loved the Pork Red Chile and we both thought the Chicken Chipotle was good. Henry wouldn't touch them because you know, 3 year olds. Leo had the mole one and loved every bite!
For dessert we had the pumpkin tamales which you may be thinking sounds gross, but there's no masa, it's basically just crust less pumpkin pie wrapped in a corn husk. The flavor was great, but I'm not really a pumpkin pie fan so... Henry enjoyed it as did Leo. We tried the guava candy which was almost the consistency of a gumdrop in a roll with a sweet fruity flavor. It was too much for me, but Henry loved it. The coconut candy was just that, sticky sweet coconut - so so good!
Fortunately for us, the tamales comes in 2 packs so we get to do it all over again! If you're in the Phoenix area, give The Tamale Store a try!