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—a whole lot of kilos in shades of blue, yellow, purple—is boiled and steeped for hours in an alkaline resolution, a course of referred to as nixtamalization. Then it’s rinsed, milled, aerated, and eventually handed by a machine that cuts the ensuing masa dough into good tortillas and griddles them. By 8 a.m. or so, the employees could have made about 1,000 kilos of masa and lots of a whole lot of tortillas, which scent like popcorn and style earthy and historic.
The tortillas you would possibly buy on the grocery retailer and even your favourite Mexican restaurant in all probability don’t encourage the identical stage of non secular awakening. Optimization for price and comfort has made the common 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 corporations are hoping to alter that, to usher in a wave of masa comprised of single-origin, heirloom corn that restores the sanctity of Mexican culinary stalwarts resembling tortillas and tamales.
The primary time I tasted a tortilla that fully 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 bought 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 Surprise Bread. Tortillas have been a giant a part of my weight loss 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 the market in Santiago Atitlán, it occurred to me that for my whole 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 number of thousand years later. Our trendy 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 exceptional 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 resembling 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 cellular—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 approach, although, is time intensive. So across the flip of the twentieth century, an enterprising tortilla maker developed a approach to make masa behave extra like wheat flour, dehydrating and packaging it in order that tortillas might be made shortly by simply including water. This innovation, referred to as masa harina, finally helped unfold tortillas throughout the U.S. and the world, most notably by Gruma, the world’s largest producer of corn flour (model title: 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 in opposition to 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 recollections of consuming her buñuelos and tamales, however can bear in mind just about nothing about her tortillas. My mother couldn’t both. They have been in all probability comprised of Maseca. Not less than till just lately, for a lot of Individuals, tortillas made with commodity corn—and in addition masa harina, in lots of circumstances—have been the one simply obtainable possibility. 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 massive, in actual fact, 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 de facto 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’d 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, primarily, 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 purchasers the way to use it. Finally, Masienda got here up with its personal heirloom spin on masa harina, and the buyer enterprise took off on-line through the early days of the coronavirus pandemic. Complete 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 development lately of consumers wanting extra genuine Mexican meals and components. It isn’t nearly Tex-Mex anymore,” Ana Maria Huertas Buitrago, a Complete Meals spokesperson, informed me. Masienda’s masa harina has seen 73 p.c development this 12 months in contrast with the identical time final 12 months, she mentioned.
In his guide Taco USA, the meals journalist Gustavo Arellano writes that the tortilla “transmits heritage, race, class and sweetness inside its round border.” To style a tortilla comprised of heirloom corn is to get a bit of nearer to its historic roots, however that heritage is being marketed, at the least proper now, largely to the economically advantaged buyers at Complete 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 lower than nearly another ethnic group in the US, in keeping with a 2023 census report. Enrique Ochoa, a professor of Latin American research at Cal State Los Angeles, referred to as that mismatch a “elementary contradiction.” The masa revolution is basically pricing out the descendants of the individuals who invented it, however Ochoa informed me it’s additionally thrilling. The tortilla has come a great distance from the times of the Spanish conquistadors, who seen masa because the unhealthy meals of an uncivilized folks and imported wheat as an alternative. (That wheat, meant for bread, additionally gave rise to the flour tortilla.). At the moment, Mexican meals—and most particularly tortillas—are mainstays of the American weight loss 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 non secular expertise, a kind of communion with the elders who found the way to coax from corn its unbelievable style and dietary worth. Seeking 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 stuffed my house 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.
