At about midnight every weekday, a bunch of 5 women and men arrives on the darkened restaurant doorways of Sobre Masa in Brooklyn and performs a sacred artwork of transformation. Heirloom corn—tons of of kilos in shades of blue, yellow, pink—is boiled and steeped for hours in an alkaline resolution, a course of referred to as nixtamalization. Then it’s rinsed, milled, aerated, and at last handed by means of a machine that cuts the ensuing masa dough into excellent tortillas and griddles them. By 8 a.m. or so, the employees could have made about 1,000 kilos of masa and plenty of tons of of tortillas, which odor like popcorn and style earthy and historic.
The tortillas you may buy on the grocery retailer and even your favourite Mexican restaurant in all probability don’t encourage the identical degree of religious awakening. Optimization for value and comfort has made the typical tortilla extra redolent of cardboard than corn, designed not for taste however to encase scrumptious fillings. However a rising group of cooks, eating places, and firms are hoping to vary that, to usher in a wave of masa produced from single-origin, heirloom corn that restores the sanctity of Mexican culinary stalwarts similar to tortillas and tamales.
The primary time I tasted a tortilla that utterly blew my thoughts, I used to be in Guatemala. At a street-corner stall beside Lake Atitlán, a lady was flipping small, puffy, blue discs on a comal; she offered me a thick stack, nonetheless toasty, packaged in a black plastic bag. Consuming them was like tasting artisanal sourdough for the primary time when all you’d ever had was Marvel Bread. Tortillas have been a giant a part of my food plan rising up in Southern California—from the grocery retailer, at my mother’s favourite Mexican market, and sometimes handmade by my great-grandma. However as I walked by means of the market in Santiago Atitlán, it occurred to me that for my total life, I had been lacking out.
The inhabitants of modern-day Mexico started cultivating corn some 9,000 years in the past and found nixtamalization a couple of thousand years later. Our fashionable phrase for this alchemy descends from the Nahuatl phrases nextli (“ashes”) and tamalli (“corn dough”). When simmered in an alkaline broth, humble corn undergoes a outstanding bodily and chemical alteration: Its outer hull breaks down and its starches flip gelatinous, not solely making the grain tastier and simpler to digest but in addition altering the protein construction in order that important vitamins similar to niacin, calcium, and amino acids are simpler for the physique to soak up. Nixtamalization turns corn right into a worthy dietary staple. Some anthropologists have argued that the method helped spur the rise of the good Mesoamerican societies such because the Maya and the Aztec. And when the tortilla turned a mainstay, someday after 300 B.C.E., its portability helped foster the expansion of advanced—and cell—empires. The Aztec believed that the tortilla had a soul. One Maya tribe buried its useless with tortillas. Others believed the primary people sprang from corn dough. From corn, masa. And from masa, life.
Making masa the old-school method, although, is time intensive. So across the flip of the twentieth century, an enterprising tortilla maker developed a method to make masa behave extra like wheat flour, dehydrating and packaging it in order that tortillas could possibly be made rapidly by simply including water. This innovation, referred to as masa harina, ultimately helped unfold tortillas throughout the U.S. and the world, most notably by Gruma, the world’s largest producer of corn flour (model identify: Maseca) and tortillas (Mission and Guerrero). It additionally made most tortillas style like nothing; purists argue that the additional processing strips them of vitamins. Small tortilla makers filed doomed antitrust lawsuits towards Gruma; many went out of enterprise.
As Gruma’s merchandise—comparatively tasteless, spectacularly handy—proliferated, conventional tortilla making declined. My great-grandma was a Texas Mexican, and I’ve many fond reminiscences of consuming her buñuelos and tamales, however can bear in mind nearly nothing about her tortillas. My mother couldn’t both. They have been in all probability produced from Maseca. Not less than till just lately, for a lot of People, tortillas made with commodity corn—and likewise masa harina, in lots of instances—have been the one simply out there choice. In the meantime, demand for tortillas has exploded. One report valued the 2023 U.S. tortilla market at $6.7 billion. Final 12 months, Gruma alone had internet U.S. gross sales of $3.6 billion.
The market is so giant, in reality, that artisanal producers have began to suppose they’ll squeeze in too. Sobre Masa—“about masa” in Spanish—opened in Brooklyn in 2021. It at the moment provides about 50 eating places along with its personal and is within the midst of increasing its small in-restaurant tortilleria operation to a 5,000-square-foot house close by. The restaurant rotates amongst 10 or so kinds of heirloom corn, a lot of which it sources from a Mexico-based wholesaler referred to as Tamoa. “Our aim is absolutely to raise and convey extra consciousness to the components that folks do not essentially see,” Zack Wangeman, the chef-owner of Sobre Masa, informed me. In Portland, Oregon, Three Sisters Nixtamal sells recent masa and tortillas domestically and ships hominy, corn, and DIY nixtamalization kits nationally. Adriana Azcárate-Ferbel, one of many co-founders of Three Sisters, informed me that she was impressed to begin making tortillas as a result of the merchandise within the U.S. simply didn’t match the standard of tortillas she grew up consuming in Mexico. They have been lacking, as she put it, the “corn spirit.” Her mother would convey baggage of Mexican tortillas on visits. “I might actually stockpile them within the freezer,” she mentioned.
The breakout star of the artisanal masa motion is Masienda. Jorge Gaviria began the corporate a decade in the past with the aim of making, basically, a classier model of Goya Meals. Masienda started by promoting heirloom corn from Mexico to eating places, and Gaviria needed to educate lots of his chef shoppers methods to use it. Ultimately, Masienda got here up with its personal heirloom spin on masa harina, and the buyer enterprise took off on-line in the course of the early days of the coronavirus pandemic. Entire Meals began carrying Masienda’s masa harina nationally in 2023, and ready-made frozen tortillas debuted this 12 months, Gaviria informed me. “Now we have seen a pattern in recent times of shoppers wanting extra genuine Mexican meals and components. It is not nearly Tex-Mex anymore,” Ana Maria Huertas Buitrago, a Entire Meals spokesperson, informed me. Masienda’s masa harina has seen 73 % development this 12 months in contrast with the identical time final 12 months, she mentioned.
In his ebook Taco USA, the meals journalist Gustavo Arellano writes that the tortilla “transmits heritage, race, class and wonder inside its round border.” To style a tortilla produced from heirloom corn is to get just a little nearer to its historic roots, however that heritage is being marketed, no less than proper now, largely to the economically advantaged buyers at Entire Meals and diners at upscale Mexican joints. Masienda’s masa harina is infinitely extra corn-y than Maseca; it’s additionally $12 for two.2 kilos, in contrast with $6 for 4 kilos of Maseca on the Mexican grocer across the nook from me. Hispanic folks earn much less than virtually some other ethnic group in america, in line with a 2023 census report. Enrique Ochoa, a professor of Latin American research at Cal State Los Angeles, referred to as that mismatch a “basic contradiction.” The masa revolution is essentially pricing out the descendants of the individuals who invented it, however Ochoa informed me it’s additionally thrilling. The tortilla has come a good distance from the times of the Spanish conquistadors, who considered masa because the unhealthy meals of an uncivilized folks and imported wheat as a substitute. (That wheat, supposed for bread, additionally gave rise to the flour tortilla.). At present, Mexican meals—and most particularly tortillas—are mainstays of the American food plan whilst Washington pursues insurance policies to maintain precise Mexicans in a foreign country.
The masa entrepreneurs I interviewed spoke about making masa as a religious expertise, a form of communion with the elders who found methods to coax from corn its unbelievable style and dietary worth. Searching for my very own metaphysical expertise, I purchased some dried blue dent corn and soaked it in calcium hydroxide for 9 hours till its thick outer pores and skin peeled off. My tiny New York kitchen doesn’t comprise a molinito for milling masa or a metate for grinding it by hand, so I settled for a meals processor. My extra-chunky masa turned tamales, neat little packages that crammed my residence with the scent of corn as they steamed. They weren’t something just like the tamales I grew up consuming, and but they have been nonetheless nostalgic—paying homage to a time earlier than me, when the tortillas of my ancestors tasted extra like corn.
