Tamale-eating training: round one

On September 27th, the City of Lewisville, TX is hosting a tamale-eating contest as part of their Western Day 2008 festival.

This is the closest annual event to home that is sponsored by the International Federation of Competitive Eating, and seems like a great place to start.

A couple of weeks ago, I was out having dinner with Brandon and Jaime, and they watched me eat an entire pizza by myself.  I was hungry, but they insisted I should enter the Nathan’s Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest.

I figured I should probably start off on an even other than the Super Bowl of eating contests, so I hit up the Major League Eating website to find out what other contests are out there.  Turns out there’s one three hours away in a couple of weeks.  Object: Tamales.

So on Labour Day, we decided to head on over to Pancho’s (all you can eat!) to begin my training.

The girl at the buffet line seemed bemused that I would request “as many tamales as would fit” on my plate.  She needed a number.

“I’ll start with a dozen”

That dozen lasted all of six minutes.

A second batch was on its way as I completed the initial dozen, but that batch was so sub-par (even by Pancho’s standards) that I couldn’t keep them down.  It wasn’t that I was full; I followed up the crushed tamales with a pair of enchiladas and a sopapilla.

It wasn’t record time by anyone’s calculation.  Eater X set the world tamale record last year in Lewsiville at 71 in ten minutes.  The second-place guy was up there at 51.  But since I’d never had a tamale before, setting a twelve-minute pace of 24 isn’t that shabby.  Wasn’t that pretty, either.

I’ll keep working on it.