Market Stall · Herb Tamale
Tamalitos de Chipilín
📷 Closely related photo — Photo: Beltran Milton / Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 4.0
Chipilín is a leafy legume, Crotalaria longirostrata, whose leaves add a grassy, faintly bitter flavour and flecks of green to the masa.
Small corn-masa tamales flecked with chopped chipilín leaf, wrapped in mashan or banana leaf and steamed in tall stacked baskets. Vendors sell them still warm, split open and eaten plain or with tomato salsa.
Why it's made this way: Chipilín grows abundantly in the humid Verapaz lowlands, and the herb shows up here far more than in the drier Guatemalan highlands to the west.
More from Guatemala
Part of World of Street Food — 3443 dishes from 118 countries.
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