Dan Pashman: Hey, everyone, it's Dan. And today we're launching something really special. It's a brand new podcast called Deep Dish. It's part detective show, part quest through history  and part cooking class. And I'm so excited about the hosts, our old friends, Sohla and Ham El-Waylly — you've heard them here on the show before. Ham and Sohla are a husband and wife team. They're both chefs, recipe developers and YouTube stars. You might have seen their New York Times cooking videos. Sohla also has a YouTube series for History Channel called Ancient Recipes. And her first cookbook Start Here, it was just named one of the best cookbooks of 2023 by The New York Times.

Dan Pashman: Now, in each episode of Deep Dish, you’ll hear the surprising story behind the food and get a window into how Sohla and Ham think about cooking. Make sure you listen all the way to the end to hear Sohla and Ham whip up a recipe inspired by the dish they're learning about and you can find that recipe on their Instagrams and mine. This first season of Deep Dish will be four episodes, and all four episodes will appear right here in The Sporkful feed over the next month. So please open up your podcasting app, go to the Sporkful page and click follow or subscribe or favorite or whatever it is in your app. That way you won't miss any episodes of Deep Dish or The Sporkful. You can do it right now while you're listening. Thank you. Now The Sporkful presents Deep Dish with Sohla and Ham.

Sohla El-Waylly: The kind of food the kids are into is when you take a tortilla, put stuff on the four different quadrants and fold it up — you know what I'm talking about? 

Ham El-Waylly: I know exactly what you’re talking about.

Sohla El-Waylly: That's ... That's ... Oh, look at me, I'm such a cook.

Ham El-Waylly: Do you remember that casserole dish filled with raw dry pasta, a block of fet cheese in the middle, [SOHLA El-WAYLLY LAUGH] and then you throw that in the oven?

Sohla El-Waylly: Uh-huh.

Ham El-Waylly: If you're throwing a whole block of feta in a casserole dish and surrounding it with stuff and then throwing it in the oven and call yourself some kind of chef, you're a disgrace.

Sohla El-Waylly: [LAUGHS]

Ham El-Waylly: That is the most offensive example of cooking that I have probably ever seen in my entire life. If None of us want anything to do with you.

Sohla El-Waylly: No, no. Not at all. Not at all. Learn a skill. Make a tamale.

MUSIC

Sohla El-Waylly: Welcome to Deep Dish, the show where we do deep dives on dishes we love and then cook them. I'm Sohla.

Ham El-Waylly: And I'm Ham.

Sohla El-Waylly: We're married.

Ham El-Waylly: And we're chefs.

Sohla El-Waylly: We nerd out on food together all day long.

Ham El-Waylly: And we love learning about the stories behind different dishes and ingredients.

Sohla El-Waylly: Now we're going to do all that nerding out on this podcast.

Ham El-Waylly: In each episode of Deep Dish, we’ll deep dive into the story behind a food.

Sohla El-Waylly: Then we’ll head home to our kitchen, and see what we feel inspired to cook up. 

Ham El-Waylly: Today’s story: Two dead bodies and a trunk full of tamales.

MUSIC

Ham El-Waylly: Sohla, have you ever heard the story about the blues musician who sold his soul to the devil? 

Sohla El-Waylly: No. [LAUGHS]

Ham El-Waylly: No?

Sohla El-Waylly: Nu-uh.

Ham El-Waylly: As the legend goes, Robert Johnson was this young man from rural Mississippi, and he really wanted to be this amazing blues musician, but unfortunately, like many people with dreams, he did not have the skills to back it up.

Sohla El-Waylly: [LAUGHS]

Ham El-Waylly: So in 1930, he went to a crossroads in Clarksdale, Mississippi, and made a deal with the devil. And after making this deal with the devil, he became one of the most influential bluesmen around.

[ROBERT JOHNSON TRACK]

Ham El-Waylly: He was a guitar picking fiend. You know what the price was? His soul. 

Sohla El-Waylly: Whoa.

Ham El-Waylly: What makes this even more incredible is that he only recorded a handful of songs, and one of those songs is about tamales. 

[ROBERT JOHNSON "THEY'RE RED HOT"]

Ham El-Waylly: The song is about hot tamales, to be exact, and until recently I just assumed that this was a spicier version of Mexican tamales, but boy was I wrong. It turns out that hot tamales, also known as Delta tamales, are a unique dish that comes from the Mississippi Delta. They basically break all the rules that I know for making Mexican tamales.

MUSIC

Ham El-Waylly: There's lots of variations on traditional Mexican tamales, but there are a few basic rules that they all follow.  One: Tamales are made with masa. And masa at its core, it's made from dried field corn, cooked in a basic solution, usually made from calcium hydroxide, and then ground into this wet dough known as masa. 

Ham El-Waylly: Two: If you add meat as a filling, that meat is usually braised or stewed. Three: The tamales are steamed in water. They end up firm enough that you can eat them with one hand, and it's a great walking snack. Delta tamales basically say, to hell with your rules.

Sohla El-Waylly: [LAUGHS]

Ham El-Waylly: Delta tamales can be made with masa, or regular old cornmeal.

Sohla El-Waylly: That’s crazy.

Ham El-Waylly: I’m just getting started. I’m just getting started. Filling? It's usually this like, ground meat mixture, closer to a chili. So you've got like a chili vibe inside of your cornmeal. And most importantly, Delta tamales are either steamed or poached in a broth. And what you get is a wet, soft tamale that really captures and soaks up the flavor of the broth it's cooked in.

Sohla El-Waylly: Mm. 

Ham El-Waylly: And in Clarksdale, where Robert Johnson met the devil, there’s a tamale maker named Charles Sledge. People come from all over the country to eat his tamales, and he’s got a pretty crazy story about how he got in the business in the first place. For Charles, this tamale journey begins with his grandfather.

Charles Sledge: My grandfather was a big time gambler here, man.  This dude got banned from all the casinos here, man, because he knew how to count cards. It was just impossible how he did the stuff he did. I mean he told us once that, man, he sold his soul to the devil.

Sohla El-Waylly: Lotta people sell their soul to the devil in this region.

Ham El-Waylly: How does one offer up their soul?

Sohla El-Waylly: I don't know, but I would love another bedroom.

Ham El-Waylly: [LAUGHS]

Sohla El-Waylly: And a full size fridge?

Ham El-Waylly: It’s a low bar.

Sohla El-Waylly: [LAUGHS]

Ham El-Waylly: Charles’s grandfather was getting kicked out of all these casinos, so he had to find other places to gamble.

Charles Sledge: He used to go to these hole in the wall type clubs at night.

Ham El-Waylly: Mm-hmm.

Charles Sledge: And man, they used to have tamales, man. And he'll bring some home when he make it back in and I'd be up waiting on him to come in. And that's how I got to learn, you know, to love tamales, man, through my grandfather. He used to bring them home all the time.

Sohla El-Waylly: So what’s the backstory behind these tamales? How did they get developed in the first place? 

Ham El-Waylly: So there are couple of stories floating around. One is that it's based on a cornmeal dish that enslaved Africans made in the South. Another one is there's a Native American cornbread, which I know you're familiar with already.

Sohla El-Waylly: Yeah, we made it for the History Channel on Ancient Recipes. It's the original cornbread. And it's just a big wheel of masa that's wrapped in husks and boiled.

Ham El-Waylly: But the most common story is that in the 1900s, Mexican migrants came to the South to work the cotton fields, and they brought their tamales with them. Black sharecroppers, who were also working the fields alongside them, they got interested in these tamales and then started making changes and tweaks to the recipe to suit their own tastes. 

Ham El-Waylly: So while the Delta Tamale originated with the Mexican Tamales, it's kind of morphed into a very Black Southern food. Greenville, Mississippi named itself the Hot Tamale Capital of the World in 2013.

Sohla El-Waylly: So is this a dish that's everywhere in the Delta? Are there hot tamales on every corner of the area?

Ham El-Waylly: No, it’s kind of the opposite. It seems like there’s fewer and fewer people making and selling hot tamales in the Delta, so it’s not guaranteed that they’ll be around forever.

MUSIC

Ham El-Waylly: Back to Charles Sledge. Charles grows up and joins the Clarksdale Police Force. But tamales are always occupying the back of his mind. He really wants to learn how to make them, but he never has the time.

Sohla El-Waylly: Wow.

Ham El-Waylly: So, it's just this idea in the back of his head and it just keeps growing and nagging at him, and so it's always there.

Sohla El-Waylly: There's like a little tamale spirit calling to him. 

Ham El-Waylly: Calling to him. 

Sohla El-Waylly: His whole life.

Ham El-Waylly: Mm-hm.

Charles Sledge: Yeah, I started trying to make the tamales by hand. Man, it was all wrong, man.

Ham El-Waylly: [LAUGHS]

Charles Sledge: I’m talking about the masa tastes like cornbread and the meat mixture was almost good. And I’m like, nah, there’s something wrong with this, man.

Ham El-Waylly: So when Charles first started doing this and dipping his toe into the tamale world, he would go to different places and ask people how to just — you know, how they made their tamales, or what was in their broth, but it's very tough to get people to give up their tamale recipes.

Charles Sledge: It was a guy who used to sell tamales here, man. He had the best round here. I just — his was the only ones I would buy. So I went to that fella one time, man, and asked him, man, "Man, can you show me how to make this, this broth?", He would not tell me and he changed the subject on me.

Ham El-Waylly: Really? Keeping that a secret like the Colonel?

Charles Sledge: Yeah, it's a secret man.

Ham El-Waylly: So Charles understood why no one wanted to share their top secret Delta tamale recipes, but at the same time he was really starting to worry that, that the hot tamales wouldn't get passed down and would eventually just not exist anymore. There was no one passing them on because they were holding on to them so tightly.  

Charles Sledge: The guy that used to make 'em here?

Ham El-Waylly: Mm-hmm.

Charles Sledge: Who I used to get mines from? He left. He moved away, and the other guy that used to fix him, he died. So it was no more good tamales.

Ham El-Waylly: Oh, so you had to learn to make them yourself.

Charles Sledge: I had to learn to make 'em, cause I like them, man. Without them two people here, it — you couldn't get 'em. So I had to learn how to make them.

Ham El-Waylly: So there's a big moment in his life that kind of really kick started his tamale making.

MUSIC

Ham El-Waylly: He’s been a cop for 4 years. And Christmas Eve, 2008, he gets a call on the police radio.

Charles Sledge: it was a car driving on the wrong side of the bypass, had just left Shady Nook service station off the highway.

Ham El-Waylly: The car was driving along the wrong side of the highway. So it's a pitch black night, and there are no lights over the highway.

Sohla El-Waylly: Oh.

Ham El-Waylly: So this is a highway that's completely dark.

Charles Sledge: And we tried to catch up with this guy, man, to get him to stop, but we couldn't make it cause he was already headed down the bypass. And we couldn't catch up with him before he collided. It hit another car head on, man.

Ham El-Waylly: That is a bad accident.

Sohla El-Waylly: Yeah.

Ham El-Waylly: That is a really, really bad accident.

Charles Sledge: I was like the first one to arrive on the scene. It was rough, man. It was the motor had been pushed in the inside of the car. The two people in the car that was driving on the wrong side of the road, they both were alive in there. But the other car that was headed towards Memphis, both of those people died.

MUSIC

Ham El-Waylly: The people who were hit, the ones who didn’t do anything wrong, they were the ones who died. When Charles inspects the accident a little closer, he sees something new, something that he's never seen at a crime scene before.

Charles Sledge: So once I went to the other car, the car where the people had died, I was shining my flashlight, you know, in the car, man. And man, it was hot tamales scattered all over that car.

Ham El-Waylly: Like, bloodstained tamales strewn all over the road.

Charles Sledge: I mean, tamales was everywhere, all over the car. It was just strange. I'd never seen nothing like that.

Sohla El-Waylly: This was Christmas?

Ham El-Waylly: This was Christmas Eve.

Sohla El-Waylly: If the car was full of tamales, they had plans. 

Ham El-Waylly: Yeah, they're going somewhere. They were going to a party to celebrate Christmas.

MUSIC

Ham El-Waylly: So, it's really dark, and Charles is investigating the crime scene, and he's got a flashlight, and he's kind of shining it around everywhere to see what else he can find. And then Charles sees something else on the floor of the car. It's a business card.

Charles Sledge: It was Tio Carlos Tamale machine. And that's a company in Texas that sell tamale making machines. I took pictures of the scene. And one day, man, I was sitting in my office and just going through the pictures. I said, well, let me call this place and see how much this machine costs.

Sohla El-Waylly: He's like, hey, let's make tamales?

Ham El-Waylly: Mm-hm. Let's make them.

Sohla El-Waylly: That's not where my head would go.

Ham El-Waylly: He’s like, interesting, look at this factory, let me give them a call.

Sohla El-Waylly: I may never eat a tamale again if I see that.

Ham El-Waylly: Well, Charles told me that he’d seen a lot of accidents over his career. 

Sohla El-Waylly: You know you can get used to anything, huh?

Ham El-Waylly: That's really what it shows you.

Sohla El-Waylly: Yeah.

Ham El-Waylly: And he ends up ordering a tamale machine for six hundred and thirty dollars

Ham El-Waylly: The machine is called Tamale King.

Sohla El-Waylly: The machine is called Tamale King? 

Ham El-Waylly: Yes. 

Sohla El-Waylly: Wow.

Ham El-Waylly: So he orders it, and when he hangs up the phone, he thinks ...

Charles Sledge: Man, I'm finna be the tamale king round here!

[LAUGHING]

Sohla El-Waylly: Does he have a crown?

Ham El-Waylly: I don't know, maybe we should send him one.

Sohla El-Waylly: We gotta send him a crown made out of husks. 

Ham El-Waylly: We'll send him a crown.

Sohla El-Waylly: He sounds really excited.

Ham El-Waylly: Oh, he loves tamales.

Sohla El-Waylly: How big is this machine? 

Ham El-Waylly: Let's take look. I got a picture of it, right here. 

Sohla El-Waylly: Oh, it's not that big.

Ham El-Waylly: It's not that big.

Sohla El-Waylly: It's like a tabletop situation. It's like a little bigger than a sausage stuffer. 

Ham El-Waylly: Mh-hm. And it has two cylinders. One you fill with your masa, the other one you fill with your filling.

Sohla El-Waylly: So there's this big cylinder at the top and the like, what, the outer ring has the masa, the inner ring has the meat, and then you crank and it comes together.

Ham El-Waylly: Exactly. 

Sohla El-Waylly: I — let's get one!

Ham El-Waylly: That's cool. Right? And it's ...

Sohla El-Waylly: I think we could do a lot with this, not just tamales. We could do stuffed in gnocchi.

Ham El-Waylly: Uh-huh.

Sohla El-Waylly: Ooh, ooh, like stuffed sausage. Like, you know when you do sausage with, like, another meat inside? Almost like a ballantine?

Ham El-Waylly: Uh-huh, uh-huh. So I see your eyes are wide with excitement. 

Sohla El-Waylly: And imagine if I could just make my own tamales? I feel really connected to Charles because I'm always frustrated that I cannot find a good tamale in New York. It's very, very hard. And I usually end up making them for myself, and it takes forever, and we end up packing the freezer, and then once we eat through them, I'm sad again. 

Ham El-Waylly: They're gone. You have to wait until the next time the urge comes to make tamales. 

Sohla El-Waylly: But with this, I feel like I could bust out tamales every weekend. 

Ham El-Waylly: And that’s exactly what Charles finds, too. He can use this machine to make lots of tamales in a short amount of time. The perfect tool for someone who wants to start a tamale business on the side. But first, Charles has to get the recipe right, and to do that, he needs some help.

Charles Sledge: I went to my grandmother, man, and she kinda pointed me in the right direction. She told me how much of this to put in it and how much of that to put in it.

Ham El-Waylly: Charles’s grandmother is from Mexico, and she had experience making Mexican tamales. 

Sohla El-Waylly: It was his grandfather that brought him the buckets of tamales, and his grandmother that helped him refine his recipe. That's like ... There's a lot of culture there, a lot of of history. 

Ham El-Waylly: A lot of history, and a lot of close family ties. So his grandmother helps him with the general tamale making and also helps teach him the proper proportions of seasoning.

Charles Sledge: The cumin, the number one seasoning that make a tamale tastes like a tamale ...

Ham El-Waylly: Mm-hmm.

Charles Sledge: She told me how much of that to put in my mixture.

MUSIC

Charles Sledge: And man, when I did that, it just totally changed it.

MUSIC

Ham El-Waylly: So, Charles spends two years working on this recipe in his garage, perfecting the spice blend, getting the broth exactly right, and people start taking notice.

MUSIC

Charles Sledge: Everybody that ate 'em, they like, man, these good.

Ham El-Waylly: [LAUGHS]

Charles Sledge: My coworkers started telling me, man, you need to start selling these. And that's when I started, man. I started my little business.

MUSIC

Ham El-Waylly: Coming up, Charles starts a tamale business, and when he wants to take it to the next level, inspiration comes from another fateful police call.

MUSIC

+++ BREAK+++

MUSIC

Ham El-Waylly: I'm Ham.

Sohla El-Waylly: And I'm Sohla.

Ham El-Waylly: Welcome back to Deep Dish, our collaboration with our friends at The Sporkful food podcast. If you’re new to The Sporkful, we hope you’ll listen to some of their episodes right here in the same feed as Deep Dish. 

Sohla El-Waylly: Check out Dan’s recent conversation with our friend Yewande Komolafe. She came to the U.S. from Nigeria for college, but lost her visa because of a clerical error. 

Ham El-Waylly: For years, she felt she had to hide parts of herself, and her food, for fear of being outed as undocumented. And because of her status, she couldn’t go back to Nigeria for years. 

Sohla El-Waylly: It all culminates with her new cookbook, but there are so many twists and turns along the way. Hear Yewande’s story in The Sporkful episode “Rediscovering Nigeria By Becoming American,” from October.

Ham El-Waylly: So back to the story of Charles Sledge in Clarksdale, Mississippi. He’s selling tamales out of his garage, and he knew he needed to take his food to people. He needed to take his tamale business to the next level.

Ham El-Waylly: So, much like he discovered his first piece of equipment from a police call, the tamale machine, he gets his next piece of equipment, kind of in the same way. Charles has, like, some good police call luck. 

Sohla El-Waylly: [LAUGHS]

Charles Sledge: One day a horse got loose in a horse pasture.

Sohla El-Waylly: [LAUGHS] Wait, is he supposed to chase the horse down? 

Ham El-Waylly: Well, his job was to let people know that there was a loose horse, and to wait for them ...

Sohla El-Waylly: Can horses do a lot of damage? Is it like a loose lion?

Ham El-Waylly: Well, they can run in the road and get themselves killed and potentially someone driving a car.

Charles Sledge: We ended up going over there trying to let the cars know that, hey, it's a horse out, so be careful, and waiting on the owners to come put the horse back in.

Sohla El-Waylly: This reminds me of when I used to work at an animal shelter and sometimes a dog would get out. 

Ham El-Waylly: Mm-hmm. Would you call the cops?

Sohla El-Waylly: [LAUGHS] No, we did not call the cop. but we would just start screaming, "Loose dog! Loose dog!"

Ham El-Waylly: [LAUGHS] To alert everyone?

Sohla El-Waylly: Uh-huh.

Ham El-Waylly: So, he goes out to let people know that there's this loose horse, and then he goes to the pasture to just wait for the owner, and then he sees it.

Charles Sledge: While over there I seen this popup camper laying in the horse pasture, man. And I'm like, man, I can make a food trailer outta that thing. So I ended up calling the guy, man, and he sold that thing to me for like $700. I brought that thing home, man, and I gutted it out. And my father came over, man, and studded it out and we walled it off. And when I got through with it, man, it looked like a commercial kitchen in there.

Sohla El-Waylly: It shows how important it is to be focused about one thing.

Ham El-Waylly: if you are focused and have your goals in mind at all times, then opportunities will present themselves ...

Sohla El-Waylly: And you'll just notice them.

Ham El-Waylly: In places that you wouldn't notice them before.

Sohla El-Waylly: Yeah, yeah.

Ham El-Waylly: Because if he wasn't thinking about tamales and was just thinking about, Oh, man, I can't believe I have to take care of this horse ...

Sohla El-Waylly: [LAUGHS]

Ham El-Waylly: He wouldn't have noticed this trailer.  

Sohla El-Waylly: Whatever happened to the horse?

Ham El-Waylly: I imagine that the horse was found.

Sohla El-Waylly: You don't know. [LAUGHS]

MUSIC 

Ham El-Waylly: It’s 2011. Charles has perfected his tamale and broth recipes, and his food trailer is ready to go. 

Charles Sledge: And I named it Phat Daddy’z — that was my nickname my uncle gave me when I was a little boy.

Ham El-Waylly: [LAUGHS]

Ham El-Waylly: Charles parks his trailer by the side of a main road, not far from the crossroads in Clarksdale that Robert Johnson visited nearly a century ago.

Charles Sledge: I was a police officer still, and I had my police radio in the trailer with me just listening to the traffic. And man, one night, [LAUGHS], the one officer got on the radio, said, "Why is the traffic bagged up? Uh, something done happened on the highway?" They were like, "No, there's sledged up there. That's them customers up there trying to get some food from it." [LAUGHS] I had the red light blocking it, man. I'm talking about, it was cars down the highway, man, trying to get something to eat from my little homemade pop-up stand, man. [LAUGHS]

Ham El-Waylly: But a year later, things get tough for Charles. In 2012, he gets promoted to investigator, and suddenly he’s on call a lot more.

Charles Sledge: It's busy here, man. All kind of crime happening.

Ham El-Waylly: Oh, really?

Charles Sledge: Yeah, you be on call all the time, man. So, I couldn't go out and sell food because somebody probably got murdered or something.

Ham El-Waylly: But this new job is taking up all of his time. He doesn't have time to go around town selling tamales anymore. In 2014, he sells the trailer. He goes back to selling tamales out of his garage, as a side hustle. His wife and son help make the tamales every week, and every Saturday afternoon, people come from all over town to buy his tamales. Soon, word spreads, and he’s getting people coming from all parts of Mississippi, Arkansas, and Tennessee. Finally in 2020, Charles is able to do something he’s wanted to do for years — he retires from the police force. And he buys a legit food truck, which allows him to sell tamales full time. Now, Charles isn’t just the police detective who sells tamales on the weekends. Now, Charles is the Tamale King.

Sohla El-Waylly: [LAUGHS]

Ham El-Waylly: What's really cool about Charles’s food truck is he doesn't just limit himself to tamales either. It's very much a food truck for the people, for the neighborhood, for his community. So, he makes birria tacos with consomme. 

Sohla El-Waylly: Oh! Huh.

Ham El-Waylly: He also makes burgers, he makes fries, he makes Indian food. And he even says there's like a big Arab population in the neighborhood, which I had no idea about. So, he even serves shawarma-ish type things for them. And he also has a regional specialty — something I'd never even heard of before called "Kool-Aid pickles".

Charles Sledge: That's something that the Blacks started here in the south, man.

Ham El-Waylly: Okay.

Charles Sledge: You mostly used to get that from pregnant women.

Ham El-Waylly: [LAUGHS]

Charles Sledge: You know, you they have those different type of appetites?

Sohla El-Waylly: We need to stop the pregnant women slander. I didn’t crave one weird thing when I was pregnant. 

Ham El-Waylly: I don't know.

Sohla El-Waylly: What? What do you mean? What's the weird thing?

Ham El-Waylly: I feel like waking up in cold sweats because you need a Krispy Kreme vanilla donut at 3:33 in the morning, is ...

Sohla El-Waylly: No, I didn't do that! [LAUGHS]

Sohla El-Waylly: It was nothing weird. It's like Krispy Kreme, McDonald's french fries, and Cap'n Crunch. I would want those things normally. Okay, anyway, so tell me about these pickles. 

Ham El-Waylly: You take a jar of whole pickles, you cut them into quarters, and then you make batch of Kool-Aid, and then you store the pickles in the Kool-Aid. But Charles was adamant. He was very specific that you could only use one type of Kool-Aid flavor for the Kool-Aid pickles.

Charles Sledge: Tropical Punch.

Ham El-Waylly: Tropical Punch. Okay. So ...

Charles Sledge: It got to be Kool-Aid and not Flavor-Aid brand, just it got to be Kool-Aid.

Sohla El-Waylly: So you got sour pickles with sweet Kool-Aid. I wonder if it has kind of like a candy vibe then. 

Ham El-Waylly: Like a sweet and sour type of thing. Like sweet and sour — that McDonald's sweet and sour chicken nugget sauce. He does not eat them. He's not a big fan of them, but he says the people that do like them, go crazy for them.

Sohla El-Waylly: Huh.  

MUSIC

Sohla El-Waylly: Well, now I really, really want to try this tamale.

Ham El-Waylly: Well, I've got good news for you. We found a way for him to ship some over all the way from Mississippi to our freezer.

Sohla El-Waylly: Wow.

Ham El-Waylly: So we'll get to try some.

Sohla El-Waylly: From the Mississippi Delta to New York City.

Ham El-Waylly: We've got a sack. 

Sohla El-Waylly: I wonder if this is going to be my new favorite tamale. 

Ham El-Waylly: Coming up, we’ll find out. Plus, I’ll make a dish inspired by Charles’s story. Stick around.

MUSIC

+++BREAK+++

MUSIC

Ham El-Waylly: Welcome back to Deep Dish.

Sohla El-Waylly: Hey Ham, did you know that I have a cookbook?

Ham El-Waylly: Isn't called Start Here?

Sohla El-Waylly: Uh-huh.

Ham El-Waylly: And isn't it the perfect introduction to people who want to improve their cooking and also for people are interested in learning more about the science of why their food is they way it it?

Sohla El-Waylly: I think it's perfect for people who aren't foodies but are eaters.

Ham El-Waylly: Wow, that's the exact market fo this podcast.

Sohla El-Waylly: Mm-hmm. And I am on my west coast tour right now. You can check me out in L.A. on January 25th and 28th, San Francisco, January 29th, Portland, January 31st, and Seattle for the grand finale on February 1st.

Ham El-Waylly: Wow, what a tour.

Sohla El-Waylly: What a tour.

Ham El-Waylly: Okay, let’s get back to the show. So we’ve heard the story of hot tamales, now it’s time to head back to our kitchen to try some, which Charles Sledge shipped to us from Mississippi.

Sohla El-Waylly: Okay Ham, what do we have here? 

Ham El-Waylly: So he sent his classic chicken tamales. The tamales were frozen inside of this bright red liquid, so I immediately saw the broth.

Sohla El-Waylly: Mm.

Ham El-Waylly: And it is brick red. So I popped them in a pot, and I reheated them.

[COOKING SOUNDS] `

Sohla El-Waylly: As soon as I smell it, I smell cumin.

Ham El-Waylly: Yeah.

Sohla El-Waylly: That's the main thing you smell.

[BUBBLING POT]

Ham El-Waylly: They're lovingly tied up in their corn husks, and I think they're ready to try. Are you ready?

Sohla El-Waylly: Yeah, I'm ready.

Ham El-Waylly: All right. Mm. The texture of the masa is pretty amazing. It's really delicate. It's really soft. It's pretty close to a perfect tamale batter. 

Sohla El-Waylly: The masa from boiling is so tender. When I think of the perfect Mexican tamale, I love it when it’s like covered in lard. This feels like a lot lighter because of that simmering. It's like totally seasoned all the way through and you get like a big hit of cumin at the core in the chicken. But this is definitely a spoon eating tamale.

Ham El-Waylly: Yes.

[PUTTING A LID ON A POT]

Sohla El-Waylly: So you aren't making tamales now, you're making something inspired by these Delta tamales.

Ham El-Waylly: I am. So I kind of went in an interesting direction. Tamales came from Mexico to the Mississippi Delta, where they turned it into Delta Tamale. I'm going back in the other direction. So I'm taking the Delta tamale and taking it back to Mexico. I focused on the broth, and made a broth seasoned with a lot of cumin, some paprika, garlic powder, fresh garlic and onions. And I hit it with a little Mexican touch. I used some chipotle chilies to add a little bit of smoke and a little bit more heat. So these are — this is a hot, hot broth.

Sohla El-Waylly: It's a hotter tamale.

Ham El-Waylly: It's a hotter tamale. And since Charles likes to cook his masa directly in the broth, there's this Oaxacan masa dumpling called chochoyones, which is basically just masa seasoned with a little bit of fat and some salt, and then you roll them into balls, make a little divot in them with a stick, and then you poach them in some liquid. We're putting the broth front and center here. So here we got our chochoyones. What do you say? They're like little balls with a divot in them.

Sohla El-Waylly: Yeah, I like to think of them as Mexican matzo balls.

Ham El-Waylly: My broth is simmering right now. And I'm just gonna plop my chochoyones into the simmering broth.

Sohla El-Waylly: The chochoyones are like one of my favorite things. And it has such a long, intimidating name, but it's like the easiest dumpling you can make.

Ham El-Waylly: It's so easy. You just need masa harina, water, and some oil. So our chochollones have simmered.

[LIGHT BOILING POT]

Ham El-Waylly: They've inflated a bit. So they're ... So they're fully cooked.

Sohla El-Waylly: So before you added the chochoyone, it was just like, broth. And now, it's like ... It's more opaque, a little thickened. It kind of has the texture of a tortilla soup.

Ham El-Waylly: Mm-hmm. That's all the masa.They hydrated in the soup, thickening it. So make sure you stir it up, get all that avocado, cilantro, and raw onion throughout the soup. And give it a taste, see if it needs more lime.

Sohla El-Waylly: Oh, it's spicy — that chipotle kick in the back of the throat. It's really good. Like the broth ... the broth right now tastes like a hot tamale.

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Sohla El-Waylly: That was so cool getting to taste a piece of the Mississippi Delta. 

Ham El-Waylly: Definitely. And there’s something else Charles told me that made it even more special. He sees Phat Daddy’z as a lot more than a business. He’s carrying on the hot tamale tradition.

Charles Sledge: It is going to die out if don't nobody keep it.

Ham El-Waylly: Yeah.

Charles Sledge: You know, because all the people that made 'em, they gone, man. They either dead or too old to make 'em now. So, and a lot of the kids, they not trying to sit at home and make no tamales. You know, they want to be on the internet and YouTube and out in the streets. So yeah, it's going ... A lot of southern cooking is going to die out.

Ham El-Waylly: Keeping the Delta tamale alive is so important to him that he has broken that unspoken code of keeping your recipe secret. So anyone who asks him ...

Sohla El-Waylly: Oh, I love that.

Ham El-Waylly: Yeah, anyone who asks them how to make a Delta Tamale, he will walk them through the process. He'll tell them everything that goes in it.

Charles Sledge: When somebody asks me how to make a tamale, I teach 'em. I tell how to make it. I don't tell 'em how to make mine ...

Ham El-Waylly: [LAUGHS]

Charles Sledge: But I teach them how to make theirs. [LAUGHS]

Ham El-Waylly: Yeah. 

Charles Sledge: So I put 'em in a ... I put 'em in a ballpark, man, of them making a good tamale, but it won't be my tamale.

Sohla El-Waylly: I — see, I love that because a lot of these dishes die out because people are so protective over their secret recipe and then it's just ... It's what happens when you die, it's gone.

Ham El-Waylly: Share your family's recipes. 

Sohla El-Waylly: Aunties, we're talking to you.

[LAUGHING]

Sohla El-Waylly: Well, and I don't think there's a point in gatekeeping a recipe because, ultimately, if you are like the Delta tamale master, no one can take that from you.

Ham El-Waylly: Most people think that the secret behind the dish is the recipe.

Sohla El-Waylly: No. Yeah.

Ham El-Waylly: But that's never the case. The secret behind any dish is the hands that make it.

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Ham El-Waylly: Special thanks to Charles Sledge, the Tamale King. You can find him at Phat Daddy’z food truck on Facebook. If you want the recipe for my chochoyones, we will be posting that on Instagram.You can find me on Instagram @hamegram.

Sohla El-Waylly: And I’m @Sohlae.

Ham El-Waylly: We’ll be back on Thursday with Deep Dish episode number 2: A brief history of Korea, as told through a rice cake. You’ll be able to find it right here in feed. So be sure to go to The Sporkful show page in your podcasting app and Follow or Subscribe, that way you won’t miss it. 

Sohla El-Waylly: While you wait for that one, check out some other Sporkful episodes, like Dan’s interview with cookbook author Yewande Komolafe.

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