Name: Tamales de Rajas con Queso - Poblano Cheese Tamale Recipe! Hilah Cooking
Uploaded: 2025-06-17T14:41:19.000Z
Duration: 12 min 59 s
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Hey dudes, I'm Hilah, and today on Hilah Cooking I am making vegetarian tamales de rajas con queso.

That is vegetarian tamales with poblano pepper strips and cheese.

And this one's dedicated to the one I love.

The first one is to rehydrate the masa harina.

Masa means dough, and it's made from ground up corn kernels that have been soaked in lye, like hominy, basically.

And you can buy that sometimes fresh at a Mexican grocer, especially during Christmastime.

But you should be able to find this flour near the regular wheat flour at most major grocery stores in the U.S.

If you're not making these for a vegetarian friend, you can totally use chicken broth.

And we're just going to mix this up like this.

And I know I'm going to get questions about can you use cornmeal if you can't find masa, and you really can't.

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but there's really not a substitute for it.

If you're in Europe, you should be able to order it on Amazon if you have that.

Probably would be more exact if I weighed the masa, but I'm an American, damn it, and

Okay, so once it's a soft mass, I'm going to set that aside and let it sit for about five minutes while we whip our fat.

Since these are vegetarian, I'm going to use some butter, but lard is traditional.

I get this kind at the, any butcher will have like little lard.

And then also, again, at Mexican or Latin American groceries, this time of year especially, you can find big blocks of lard near the corn husks, which you will also need to find.

Okay, so I'm going to add a couple tablespoons of oil to this butter, and I'm just going to beat it on medium speed until it's nice and fluffy.

All right, once the butter is fluffed up like this, we're going to add a hefty pinch of salt and some of our masa.

We're just going to kind of add this in little by little while we mix it to make sure we're incorporating lots of air into the mixture.

Okay, so when it's done, it should kind of look like hummus, I guess, and kind of have the same texture.

And to check to make sure that you do have enough air beaten into the masa, I'm going to take a little blob and just drop it into a cup of water.

This works best if you can leave this to sit aside for like 15 or 20 minutes just to make sure that the flour is fully hydrated and all the little grains are plumped up.

That gives us enough time to prepare our filling.

So like I said, we're doing poblano and cheese-filled tamales, so I've got a couple of poblanos that I roasted.

If they're really huge, just cut them and put them on a baking sheet and put them in the broiler for maybe five to ten minutes.

It depends on how hot your broiler is and how close the peppers are to the heat element.

And I turn them occasionally to get all the sides blackened and a little bit blistered.

And we're going to pull them out and put them into a bowl and put a plate on it to cover it.

This will help them steam to loosen those skins so that they'll be easier to peel.

And then pretty much by the time they're cooled off, they're cool enough to, they're soft enough to peel.

For some reason, poblano, the capsaicin or whatever in the poblanos especially is very hard on my hands.

So I do recommend a few, and I don't even have sensitive skin, and jalapenos and habaneros,

I can mess with those all day long and not notice it.

But there's something different about poblanos.

This may be unorthodox, but I don't care.

So just kind of use the paper towel to help you peel the skin off, and just try not to touch the actual flesh or the seeds very much, and then of course, you know, wash your hands really well afterwards.

See, the skin should just peel right off.

If you can't get some, it's a little bit of skin, it's not going to kill you.

Nobody ever died from a little bit of skin, unless it was because they weren't using a condom.

Then, carefully again, cut the seeds out, and I'm just going to cut this into strips for rajas.

And always, always, if you're using your knife to scrape things off your board, use the back side of your knife so that you don't mess up your blade.

I still forget that sometimes, but I'm trying to get better.

Okay, and then for the cheese part, oh wait, where did my cheese go?

Where'd my chee-go, as in man-chee-go, man-chay-go is actually how you pronounce it.

That's the kind of cheese that I'm using, but any kind of good melting cheese will work, like if Monterey Jack is all you can find, that's totally great.

I'm just going to also cut this up into some little strips.

All right, the final missing piece is these corn husks.

I've had these soaking in some warm water for about 30 minutes so they're nice and pliable.

When you buy them, you'll get them in a bag like this.

They're in the produce section most of the time.

If you can't find them, I have done this with squares of parchment paper, which works okay.

These add a little bit of corn flavor, and the parchment paper, they have to cook longer, but it'll totally work.

I just weigh it down with a plate just to kind of keep everything submerged.

Oh, and then also this salsa verde, you can buy some.

I did a video for this a couple months ago, so I'll put a card for that if you want to make your own salsa verde.

Okay, so you're going to get a tamale husk.

You're going to get a corn husk, an oja, a leaf.

I kind of feel it, if you run your fingers parallel to the ridges, you should feel one side feels a little waxy and the other side feels a little sandpapery.

You want to put the waxy side up and the pointy end facing you.

If you can't figure out which side is which, don't worry about it.

Then we'll put a heaping tablespoon of masa in the upper, the wider end, and spread it out to a rectangle that's like three to four inches long and maybe two to three inches wide.

Put a little spoonful of the salsa in the middle, put a slice of cheese and a couple strips of your poblanos, or just one if you want to make it mild, I guess, get in there.

Then just sort of use the husks to wrap the masa around.

If it's a little sticking out, it's probably not traditional, but it does look prettier when they're done.

Then we're going to fold one side over and the other side over.

Fold the bottom up, and if it'll stay closed, that's great.

If not, get one of your uglier husks and shred it into little strips, and voila, nature's string.

Mother nature was looking out for us when she invented corn husks, y'all.

Then we just tie it up like a cute little ... What in the fudge?

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Tamales de Rajas con Queso - Poblano Cheese Tamale Recipe! Hilah Cooking

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