marlin that he’s marinated in lime juice for forty-five minutes.
These are both great, but Valencia’s crowning achievement is
his tamale. I confess to him early on that I’ve never really had a
tamale (there wasn’t a lot of great Mexican food where I grew up).
Valencia makes his from memory: he starts with duck fat in a
KitchenAid mixer, though he says you can also use lard.
He mixes it until it’s creamy and foamy and then adds a
spoonful and a half of baking powder and fresh masa (“Corn that’s
been nixtamalized,” he explains) in a ratio of five parts masa to one
part fat. He tests the resulting mixture to see if it’s buoyant in a
glass of water; when it floats, he knows he has it right.
We stuff the filling into corn husks and then we add chicken in a
tomatillo sauce that we made earlier. He teaches me how to seal
everything and how to place it in the steamer. The resulting tamale
—which comes out hot and steamy thirty minutes later, and which
he tops with tomatillo sauce, sour cream, queso fresco, cilantro,
and radishes—is wildly delicious. “The problem now,” he says
sincerely, “is that if this is your first tamale, it’ll spoil you for all
others.”
Valencia’s hubris is matched in equal measure by his
boyishness. While we’re cooking, he gets a text from one of his
suppliers, who saw Valencia’s Facebook status update about
drinking too much. The supplier wrote: “Slow down, Chuy.”
This riles Valencia up. “I thoroughly enjoy drinking!” he
announces to me and his sous-chef.
Then he sees me and my notepad and asks: “Are you writing