Tamale Boy

Oregon

Dec 21

Wrapped In Tradition.

In 2012, Jaime Soltero Junior, affectionately dubbed the “tamale boy” by his clients, converted a Sprinter van into a food truck to sling his sought-after tamales across the Portland area. Today, he oversees an entire fleet of food trucks for private events as well as three brick and mortar restaurants.

With Tamale Boy, Soltero’s goal is to expose people to the sheer diversity of flavors that exist within Mexico. Mexico and its cuisine are not monolithic, with each region offering its unique contribution to the whole of Mexican cuisine, a cuisine recognized by UNESCO as Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2010.

Tamales are corn-based dumplings with many fillings, ranging from meat, to vegetables, or even fruits wrapped in either corn husks or banana leaves before they are steam cooked. A pre-Columbian foodway from Mesoamerica, tamal comes from the word tamalli in Nahuatl and means "wrapped.” Nahuatl is the language of the Aztecs and remains Mexico’s largest linguistic group of the more than sixty indigenous languages spoken throughout Mexico to this day.

We are told the top-selling tamales are consistently the tinga de pollo, shredded chicken that is slowly cooked in tomatoes, chiles, garlic and spices that are piled into fresh corn masa and wrapped in a corn husk.

Is your mouth watering yet?