Aaron Sanchez's TikTok Recipe Makes Tamales From Scratch Easier Than Ever

Tamales are such a traditional Mesoamerican dish, they can seem the sole domain of a secret society of grandmothers who pass down the recipe from generation to generation. Yesterday, Aarón Sánchez decided to dispel that illusion by detailing a recipe so simple that he could relay it during a TikTok duet. 

"The idea of tamales seems to challenge everybody," he said. "Everyone seems to think that a tamale has to be made by a senora or an older lady who has been doing it her whole life." But, Sánchez continues, it isn't. All you need is four cups of maseca, two cups of warm broth, and one cup of softened manteca, which is lard. "But home rendered lard," he stressed. "Not that stuff that comes in a blue box." He promised to write up an easy lard recipe as well, but as of writing that has not happened.

However, he did give Food & Wine a lard recipe in 2015. You need some pork fat that's cut into pieces which you then place into a pot of water over a medium flame. Stirring regularly to prevent sticking, wait for the fat to dissolve. This should take two hours. After you have let the lard cool for ten minutes, strain it through some cheesecloth and keep what passes through. Now, with some practice, you can make your own tamales.

One would expect a video demystifying tamales to be met with comments of rapturous thanks. However, the comments on the TikTok video and Instagram post it appeared in later were highly critical of Aarón Sánchez. Not because the recipe itself was necessarily bad, but because he said tamale.

"It's tamal, not tamale," one comment reads. "Biggest pet peeve ever." And it's not just this video either. In 2013, Tucson.com published a piece explaining why people insist that tamal is the singular for tamales. It's because in Spanish, it is. Ruben Sahagun Jr, a restaurant owner, explained that "tamale doesn't bother me, but it doesn't sound right. It sounds wrong."

L.A. Taco discovered later, though, that "tamal" is also linguistically wrong. The word comes from the Aztec language nahuatl in which it is "tamalli." So, the really pedantic purist would see "tamal" as a Spanish mistake and "tamale" as an English mistake of a Spanish mistake. L.A. Taco's ultimate conclusion, however, was that the right word depended more on how you heard your family talking when you were a child. In Sánchez's case, it's safe to assume that he knows the Spanish singular is tamal but as with the maseca and manteca, he translates it for the English-speaking audience who would likely be watching his videos.