Thursday, 02 January 2014 00:10
BY JULIA MOSKIN
The New York Times
Without the tortilla, there is no taco. And, as the Mexican saying goes: sin maíz, no hay país.
Without corn, there is no country.
“Our people spent thousands of years growing corn, harvesting corn
and making it into masa and tortillas every single day,” said Hugo
Ortega, the Mexico City-born chef at Hugo’s restaurant in Houston. “It
is truly in our bones.”
Much of the corn in Mexico is eaten in the form of masa, soft corn
dough that is the base of the tortilla, the tamal, the gordita, the
sope, the tlacoyo — the list seems endless. The fresh, earthy taste of
masa is bigger than tacos; bigger, even, than Mexico.
“One of the only ways to define Latin American cooking, which covers
such an enormous area, is with masa,” said Maricel Presilla, the author
of “Gran Cocina Latina: The Food of Latin America.”
Corn is something Presilla has spent a great deal of time thinking
about. Chocolate and chiles, potatoes and tomatoes and other foods
native to Latin America have all been absorbed into global kitchens. But
masa remains stubbornly, proudly Latin, the clay that molded the food
traditions of a continent.
There are two distinct types of corn in Latin America: Elote is
sweet, tender corn that North Americans recognize as corn on the cob.
Maíz is hard, so-called flint corn that is dried after harvest and then
ground into flour.
It is only when maíz is “nixtamalized” that the basis for a great taco — a great tortilla — is born.
In Mexico, masa for tortillas is always made from nixtamal, dried
corn that has been treated with an alkali, like ash or slaked limestone
(called cal in Mexico), that softens its texture and vastly improves its
nutritional profile. Nixtamalization also changes the flavor and aroma
of corn in ways that are addictive and indelible but almost impossible
to describe.
“Nixtamalized corn smells like rain on hot pavement,” Presilla offered.
Lesley Téllez, a New York writer, who graduated from culinary school
in Mexico City and now leads food tours there, tried: “There’s a mineral
aroma, from the volcanic-rock millstones used to grind the corn. The
masa smells fresh and grainy, with none of the sourness or sweetness of
packaged tortillas.”
Nixtamalizing has been documented as far back as 1500 B.C. and was
traditionally a tedious process: soaking, draining, rinsing, peeling and
grinding, all by hand. The same process is used to make hominy, the
swollen white kernels that fill a bowl of pozole, and mote, whole
kernels that are simmered and roasted all along the Andean highlands,
from Ecuador to Chile.
Not coincidentally, Téllez lives near the only New York City
tortillería, or tortilla factory, which nixtamalizes and grinds its own
corn. Tortilleria Nixtamal supplies masa and tortillas to most of New
York’s top taquerias and restaurants: Dos Toros, the Fonda restaurants
in Brooklyn and Manhattan and many more.
Still, last week she pulled out her Nixtamatic, a tabletop electric
mill that she lugged home from Mexico, to make her own masa for tlacoyos
— masa cakes, thicker than tortillas and with a pronounced corn flavor,
stuffed with refried beans. She said that it was the best batch she had
ever made: airy, soft and light, made with red and white corn kernels
she brought from Mexico. (Tortillería Nixtamal uses corn grown in the
United States.)
“When you smell fresh masa, you just want to bury your face in it,” she said.
Outside Mexico, the corn for masa is dried and peeled but not
nixtamalized, making for a fluffy, mild dough. It is also ubiquitous
across Latin America. In Guatemala’s ancient creation myth, humans were
shaped from masa by the gods; today, Guatemalan cooks make masa-stuffed
tamales colorados, ruddy with achiote oil.
Modern Salvadorans still eat pupusas as a staple, which are thick
hand-shaped masa patties filled with cheese or refried beans or meat;
Venezuelans and Colombians share arepas, fragrant buns that are
irresistible slathered with butter and cheese or as an accompaniment to
soups and stews, for soaking up the juices.
In the Caribbean, where corn arrived via the Spanish conquistadors,
masa for tamales is sweetened with local sugar and studded with fruit.
And in Mexico, the month of September, corn harvest time, is marked by
tamales stuffed with a special masa of fresh, milky corn.
Throughout Latin America, Presilla said, working with masa is
considered women’s work. It took a crew of women to keep the line moving
at the Solber Pupusas stall at a science fair in Queens recently. (In
2011, Solber Pupusas won the coveted Vendy award, given to the city’s
best food vendors.) The workers are known as pupuseras, said Cesar
Fuentes, who owns Solber Pupusa with his mother, Reina Bermúdez, and her
husband, Rafael Solber.
“Girls learn from their mothers, and they learned from their mothers.”
From huge plastic tubs, each pupusera knows how to snatch a chunk of
dough, press it out into a round the size of her palm, then place a nut
of filling in the center: quesillo, a soft cheese, or pork carnitas
enriched with ground fried pork rinds, or both. Then, using the fingers
of her other hand, she gently shapes the masa around the filling and
brings all the edges together, a bit like making a Chinese soup
dumpling. Last, she twirls any extra dough into a topknot, snaps it off
and tosses it back in the tub, and pats the sealed pupusa into a patty,
to be seared on a griddle until the filling is molten and the masa
speckled with brown. For an expert, it all takes about 15 seconds.
“Working with masa is an art form,” Presilla said, inspecting the
crepe-thin edge of a tortilla as it toasted on a heavy griddle in her
kitchen in Weehawken, New Jersey.
Presilla holds a doctorate in medieval history (and, on the side,
runs two pan-Latin restaurants in New Jersey). Her vast cookbook,
published last fall, is a serious but accessible study of the
traditional foods of Central and South America and the Spanish-speaking
Caribbean nations, including Cuba, where she was born.
Making tortillas is harder than it looks, Presilla said. Unlike wheat
flour, masa has no gluten to hold it together, and the starch in corn
doesn’t grab onto water well.
“It looks easy to make a tortilla, but there are so many things that
go into it: controlling the heat, the moisture, even the amount of
contact,” she said.
Ortega would agree.
“Each tortilla has a face, you know,” he said.
The side that lands first on the comal, or black cast-iron griddle
used to cook the tortilla, is the face, and no matter how many times
it’s flipped, the rhythms of cooking will leave their mark.
Can he tell which side of a tortilla is the face just by looking at it?
“Of course,” he said, surprised by the question.
Ortega says the slightly nubbly texture and intense flavor of
tortillas made from fresh masa are worth the effort he puts into them.
“When the corn particles are cooking,” he said, “it gives the tortilla a toasty taste, like popcorn.”
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