The Best Tamale Pie With Braised Skirt Steak, Charred Corn, and Brown Butter Cornbread Crust Recipe

Tamale pie is a dish that screams for an update. I mean, it's cornbread and chili all rolled into one. Just imagine how great it could be if we took the time to make a real, deeply flavored, meaty chili from scratch, eschewing the dump-and-stir approach and instead building up layers of spices and aromatics. Now imagine that chili topped with tender, moist, crisp-edged, buttery cornbread with those chili juices seeping up into it as it bakes in the oven. That's the kind of meal I'd love to come home to after a long day out in the cold.

As I often do when working on an upgraded recipe, I started this one by tackling each element on its own: figuring out how to extract the most flavor from the meat, how to make the tastiest cornbread, the exact balance of aromatics and spices. And as I kept going, what was once a quick and easy, stir-it-together and pop-it-in-the-oven recipe became an hours-long beast. Tastier? You bet, but at the same time it ended up losing some of the simple appeal of the original. If simple is what you’re after, you’ll want to check out our quick and easy skillet tamale pie instead.

But if you want to go all-in and dedicate yourself to a real project, keep reading.

Let's do a quick review of the basic ingredients, and then I'll walk you through the cooking process.

The Meat

Classic tamale pie is made with ground beef, which cooks quickly and is always tender. For my version, I wanted to go with something a little more substantial—something that would become meltingly, fall-apart tender as it cooks with the rich broth you get only from slow-cooking. Chunks of chuck seemed like an obvious choice, but it wasn't quite right. Instead, I decided to take a cue from Cuban-style ropa vieja, a stew made with skirt steak that is cooked until the meat shreds.

The Chili Base

If you're familiar with any of my chili recipes, then you probably know where this is going: Ditch the jarred chili powder. For my updated version, I'm going with a chili paste using my standard chili paste method: a mix of whole dried chiles toasted then rehydrated in chicken stock before being puréed. In addition, I'm using whole cumin seeds and coriander seeds in order to maximize flavor.

The Vegetables

For the pimped-out pie, I like to build in a little bit more complexity.

I start with an onion, but thinly slice it instead of dicing (to mimic the texture of the shredded beef at the end). In addition, I add a thinly sliced red pepper, a thinly sliced poblano pepper, garlic, and a minced Serrano chile, which adds some fresh heat to complement the richer heat of the dried chiles.

The Corn

Normally I'd advocate for only getting corn that's been recently picked from the farm and cooking it on the same day in order to maximize its flavor, but who are we kidding? There's no such thing as really great sweet corn in the winter and this is a decidedly winter dish. In past experiments, I've found that at least for cooked applications like this one, frozen corn can actually fare quite well. It's been blanched before freezing so its sweetness is locked in, whereas fresh corn undergoes enzymatic breakdown that converts its sugars into starches.

That said, in this particular dish, I'm using fresh kernels cut from the cob. Why the fresh corn? We'll get to that in a minute...

Other Flavors

Classic tamale pie wouldn't be tamale pie without tomato sauce. Some canned black beans also go in to bulk it up.

I made a couple batches with various additional elements and in the end found that the tomatoes and beans in the classic recipe are superfluous, the former dulling the flavor of the chiles and the latter making the beef blander. Instead, I decided to go with an ingredient that's not common, but not unheard of in tamale pie: sliced olives. The version that appears in the Joy of Cooking actually calls for pimento-stuffed green olives, but I prefer to use the fancy unstuffed green ones from the olive bar instead. (Forget about those insipid canned black olives, please. They belong nowhere except on hangover pizza.)

The Crust

The cornmeal crust is a bit of an oddball here. The dish is distinctly Southern/Southwestern in origin, but the topping is made with a sweetened, yellow corn, Northern-style cornbread in nearly every single recipe I've seen, with the exception of the California Cooks! version my mom used to make. There, a thin, unleavened batter is made from cornmeal and it's baked with olives and cheese on top. Sounds okay, but I actually prefer the cornbread version—I love that juxtaposition of savory filling and sweet, moist, buttery crust.

I started out by using this superlative recipe for sweet and moist Northern-style cornbread from Josh Bousel (and as it turns out, one batch is precisely what you need to cover up a 12-inch skillet's worth of tamale pie), but as I was melting the butter for it, I remembered our Nila Jones's post on browned butter. One part of my brain immediately said to another part are you pondering what I'm pondering?

I think so, brain, but it makes sense, given we're both parts of the same organ and all.

I let the butter continue cooking until a nutty golden brown, then I incorporated it into the cornbread batter, using just a touch less sugar than Josh's original recipe called for—I figured with browned butter, a slightly more savory bread would work well.

I stuck my finger into the mixture and tasted it and hot damn! It was so damn good that I ended up baking a batch in the same skillet I'd just browned the butter in right then and there, requiring me to mix up some more for the actual task at hand.

After cleaning up the spilled honey that I'd just slathered over the cornbread, I turned my attention back to the pie.

Sour cream, cilantro, and scallions are my toppings of choice.

How to Make Best Tamale Pie With Braised Skirt Steak, Charred Corn, and Brown Butter Cornbread Crust

To start, we're ditching that ground beef for skirt steak, which I cut into two-inch rectangles. Skirt has a very distinct grain and the most important part is that each strand of muscle fiber should be a maximum of two inches in order to prevent the finished dish from being too stringy.

After browning the butter for my cornbread (this time in a Dutch oven), I add the skirt steak and sear it over high heat on a single side until it's deeply browned. This takes about five minutes, which is just enough time to toast and blend the chiles. I toast them in the microwave and reconstitute them in chicken stock just like in this guide.

When the steak comes out of the pan (no need to sear both sides—you get plenty of flavor browning just the bottoms), you should see a nice browned layer of fond. This will be the foundation for your braising liquid later on. For now, we're going to add that corn.

This is the reason why I prefer fresh corn here: I want to cook it until it's deeply charred, giving it a smoky, caramelized flavor. Frozen corn is simply too mushy and wet to brown effectively.

Once the corn is browned, the other vegetables go in: onions, bell, and poblano peppers.

While those vegetables soften, I grind up my cumin, coriander, and dried oregano in a mortar and pestle, then add them to the pot to toast along with my sliced garlic and Serrano pepper.

Finally, the puréed chili mixture enters the pot along with just enough extra chicken stock to mostly cover up the meat.

We're almost there. The meat and their juices go back in, along with those sliced green olives, then the stew gets covered and parked in a 300°F (150°F) oven until the meat is shreddably tender—it takes about two and a half hours. Plenty of time to work up an appetite. (If you've got a pressure cooker, you can cut that time down to about 45 minutes for equally tasty results!)

Once the meat is cooked, I give it a few final flavor boosts. First, a shot of Worcestershire sauce and some Asian fish sauce bump up the umami factor.

Some grated cheese, sliced scallions, and cilantro are essential to the flavor.

This stuff is so damn good you may well forget about that cornbread batter waiting to go on top. I wouldn't blame you for digging in with a fork straight away (I know I did).

But patience brings rewards. Step away from the skillet.

The last step of the process is simple: top with cornbread batter, bake, and serve.

My favorite bits are the parts where the cornbread is saturated with the juices from the stew. I love it when recipes work out like this. This version is immediately, undeniably tamale pie to anyone who is familiar with the dish, but it's also quite obviously something a little more. I don't want to say more delicious—because I do love the quick version too—but maybe just a bit more serious.

The stew should flow with juices as you spoon it out of the skillet, and thanks to that cornbread crust and the cast iron skillet, the whole thing stays hot for a long, long time. I scooped up a spoonful half an hour after it came out of the oven and it erupted with a cloud of steam!

I think the best way to describe a successful relationship is one in which both parties end up better for having known each other. Tamale pie, I may not know exactly where you came from, but I'm sure glad you found your way into my life.