This Pasco couple wants to go industrial — with tamales

Blanca Idalia Garza and her husband, Jose, launched Idalia’s Tamales in Pasco last summer.

On typical days, they prepare hundreds of tamales in a commercial kitchen close to downtown, then sell them at a food cart at 6403 Burden Blvd., near TRAC.

But it’s Christmas, and that is anything but normal if you’re in the tamale business.

Tamales have played a key supporting role in Mexican Christmas celebrations for hundreds of years.

Idalia’s Tamales is up to its proverbial elbows in special orders keyed to Las Posadas, which commemorates Joseph and Mary’s search for shelter.

Idalia’s spent much of December taking orders for gatherings. For instance, they’ll deliver 300 dozen — 3,600 — tamales to Ephrata on Friday for a school-related fund raiser.

For Blanca Garza, tamales are a labor of love.

She grew up in a family of agricultural workers who migrated with the growing season, traveling between Texas, Minnesota, Washington and California. They worked on sugar beets, grapes, potatoes and onion harvests before returning home.

She was a girl when the family settled in the Pasco area. As the eldest daughter she was always by her mother, cooking for the family.

She has fond memories of preparing tamales with her aunts for the holidays.

The roots of entrepreneurship were planted early.

She left school early and had a family. She went on to earn a high school equivalency degree and an associate’s degree. Her day job is coaching childcare providers to be rated in compliance with Washington’s changing laws.

But it was her tamales — made in the Texas style with thinner masa, or cornmeal — that won notice and requests from family and friends.

The idea to start a business began when she was invited to sell tamales at Osprey Pointe, where the Port of Pasco established a small food cart pod with a rotating cast of vendors this summer.

Jose Garza investigated the spot and met the owners of Delicias on Wheels, which operates a cart near TRAC. It turned out they were neighbors in Basin City.

Delicias invited Idalia’s to sell its tamales at its mobile spot and to lease its Pasco kitchen, a gleaming operation housed in a nondescript building near the Lewis Street underpass.

The couple invested personal savings in the machines they needed to produce tamales in large numbers. They employ a small team for the labor intensive process of wrapping tamales in the dried corn husks they’re cooked and served in.

(Note to rookies: Don’t eat the corn husk.)

Idalia’s leases the kitchen, cooking tamales fresh each morning and selling them at Delicias from 9 a.m. until 7 p.m., or whenever they run out.

The couple hope to open a small restaurant at some point and to add bean, cheese and beef tamales to their offerings.

But their longer-term vision is more ambitious.

They aim to produce tamales on an industrial scale, for wholesale to restaurants, grocery stores and customers.

In 10 to 12 years, they hope to turn a thriving business over to their children.

“The reason we’re building it is for our children,” she said.

This story was originally published December 19, 2017 at 6:44 PM with the headline "This Pasco couple wants to go industrial — with tamales."