Yesterday I made some bone in chicken leg quarters in the slow cooker with some salsa for Mexican food dishes this week.  I was going to make burritos using the chicken and made my Spanish rice in the instant pot.  For the burritos I was going to use corn, refried beans, large flour tortillas, cheese, sour cream, etc and then crisp up in the air fryer.  My plans quickly changed, when David came home with some masa flour.  Instead we decided to make tamales!!  

I've always heard that making tamales is labor intensive, and steered away, but honestly it wasn't any worse than making a batch of cookies.  The instant pot also helped cut the time of steaming the tamales. 

For the Masa dough, we used David's Nana Chavez's recipe which included lard, broth from the chicken, masa flour, baking powder, and salt.  We shredded the chicken and added herdez salsa ranchero and blended into the food processor.  As we were doing all of this, the corn husks were soaking in warm water to make them more pliable.  

We added a small amount of the masa dough into the corn husk and topped with the chicken, then rolled the corn husks and placed into the trivet in the instant pot with 2 cups of water.  

We placed the tamales into the instant pot and cooked for 40 min on high.  They were the most tender and soft tamales I've ever had.  Usually when I've had tamales, I've had to drench in sauce because they were so dry, but these we ate all by themselves and they were amazing!  I'll add this recipe under instant pot recipes.