I took a tortilla class yesterday, learning to make torts, gorditas and the little basket-like appetizers. The people giving it have a very small start-up company and they grind their own corn and make their own masa. The woman said that even in Mexico (where she’s from), vendors buy their masa from another company, so it’s not necessarily fresh. This stuff was made on Saturday, and all I can say is WOW! They buy their dried corn locally, using both yellow and blue, add the lime and water, and the result is a fragrant dough that is so far superior to store-bought torts that I will never buy them again. The class included a bag of masa, so naturally we had chili and torts for dinner. Awesome (and I really hate that word).
Don’t think so. I’ve been restaurants where they make the tortillas fresh, but I’m not aware if any were grinding their own corn meal. Makes me want to try it myself.
I think restaurants that make their own probably use the freeze-dried masa harina. I would be astonished if they actually ground their own corn, as they would have to have lime on hand for the mixing, which would in turn increase the liability for them.
No, but I’m very jealous. It sounds amazing.
So you buy the dough itself? Not the ground flour-like stuff?
Envious!
Of course! Here in south Texas, most restaurants have them now. (They didn’t use to… you only got factory made tortillas.) They are DEEE-vine! A fresh, homemade corn tortilla, warm, and just sprinkled with salt and rolled up is heavenly. Even better than a homemade flour tortilla IMHO.
You can buy sacks of refrigerated fresh corn masa in most grocery stores. There are places called *molinos *that make the masa as well as tortillas, and that’s likely where most restaurants get the masa for their tortillas (if they make the tortillas in-house.)
Good Eats had a program on this a while back.
When they get a little bit stale, tear one up in pieces, fry in butter till a wee bit crispy on the edges. scramble with eggs, add cheese, top with salsa or warm ranchero sauce. YUM! The best thing ever… Around here, that’s called chilequiles. It’s relatively low-carb, too, as a corn tortilla is only about 15 carbs.
Hmmm…may have to go out and find some Mexican food for lunch…
Yeah, a store in my 'hood just started carrying the dough these folks make.
When I was a kid, my friend’s mom used to make fresh tortillas with every meal. Sometimes flour, sometimes corn. I loved spending the night there. I’ve not tried making fresh corn tortillas, but I’ve thought about it. I am sure they would never measure up to Mrs. Mendoza’s, though my flour tortillas aren’t bad.
Yep. Not surprising given that there is a tortilleria a block and a half from my home. They not only grind their own, they supply a lot of the local restaurants.
One of the Mexican restaurants in town has a glassed in room, where you see a worker feeding the masa into a machine that rolls it out thinly and cuts it into a perfect circle. The worker puts the tortillas on a grill, waits a few minutes, then starts flipping them. The tortillas are then stacked and put into the little plastic keepers. The leftover masa is gathered up and then fed back into the machine to be rolled and cut out again.
Yep! The masa costs a fortune in the UK (mail ordered, I’ve never found it in a store) and is certainly not fresh. Making fresh tortillas isn’t something I do often as I don’t have a tortilla press and am lazy, but they’re good whenever I’ve make them. I’ve used the masa in all kinds of different things, too, occasionally experimenting and adding it to the flour for pizza dough, fresh pasta, dinner rolls etc… it’s fun stuff. I’d love to try some fresh but, considering the UK has only recently discovered anything chipotle, I think it’ll take a long time for fresh-ground masa to make it over here.
Just a couple of small details in the OP that seem a little odd to me.
One is that “venders buy their masa from another company.”
Most tortillerìas don’t use fresh masa, they use corn flour produced by one of two large producers, Maseca and Minsa. But there are still places that make their own nixtamal that is used for their tortillas. Now these places do sell their fresh masa to other venders but generally these are places that produce masa based products such as tortillas, sopes, gorditas or huaraches etc on a small scale.
And very, very few tortillas are made with anything other than maìz blanco (white corn cultivated especially for tortillas).
And yes, tortillas made from nixtamal are far superior to those made from corn flour.
My tortilla vocabulary isn’t what it ought to be, obviously. You’re right: she said they (meaning restaurants) use corn flour instead of nixtamal. Same in the states, for the most part.
Yep. Here we have plenty of tortillerias which sell their masa, so you’ll get fresh-ground masa corn tortillas, and also there are some places (a good bit rarer) that will nixtamalize their own corn (meaning, not get it from the tortilleria down the street), grind it down, and make fresh masa themselves. The hand-made fresh masa tortillas have a different texture to them, more crepe-like than what people think of normally as tortillas. Almost all the Mexican groceries in my neighborhood stock fresh masa, not just masa harina. But I do live in a neighborhood that either smells like chocolate, smoked sausage, or tortillas depending on which way the wind is blowing.
For example, here is the product brochure (PDF) of a local tortilleria. The masa is made from corn grown on a local Illinois family farm, and the fresh masa has a shelf life of only 24 hours. These are the guys I usually get my ready made corn tortillas from, and it’s great, as they arrive in my supermarket wrapped in wax paper, still warm. I will not buy tortillas (unless I have to) if their packaging is not still warm to the touch. However, as fresh as these tortillas are, they are still different in texture from hand-pressed tortillas made from fresh masa. Like I said, those tend to be more crepe-like, for lack of better description. A little softer, a little thicker than the machine-pressed tortillas.
Puly, have you ever bought from atotonilco direct? Its so freaking cheap! I want to say 48 dozen torillas for like 11 bucks but I am almost certainly off on that. Anyways, its a box 15x15x15 filled with hot tortillas.
The teacher was also very enthusiastic about the beans from this place.
They’re only a couple miles down the street from me, but I can’t find a use for 48 dozen tortillas at a time. 
I just buy one pack at a time from my local Pete’s Market. I know I can freeze them, but it’s not the same. They dry out a bit or something. I find tortillas to be like fresh bread. They are awesome within about 6-8 hours or so of baking/cooking, and then they turn to a reasonable and okay foodstuff, but nothing like that fresh flavor and texture.
I opened the site that you linked to and was very surprised at this comment:
- “One of our most successful corn ingredients is prepared hominy, or posole. It’s starchy corn that’s had the skin removed from soaking it in cal and then dried again. It’s a classic product of the Native Americans and yet you never see it in Mexico.”*
That is ridiculous. What they appear to be offering is nixtamal which is dried corn that has been nixtamalizado. Pozole is normally made from a specific species of corn called cacahuacintle that has also been nixtamalizado. And it is found everywhere and anywhere in Mèxico and known as maìz pozolero.. Pozole is a dish made from this product.
You probably mean masa harina made by those two companies. It’s not a tortilla if it’s not made from nixtamalized corn; it doesn’t taste even remotely close, and I sort of doubt that a corn flour tortilla would even hold together.
Masa harina’s basically dried, ground nixtamal. Even using that and getting them freshly cooked is better than a store-bought tortilla made in some factory miles away.
(I get mine at my local Mexican grocery. They’re probably not made from fresh nixtamal, but I do frequently manage to get my sack of 100 while it’s still warm from the comal (or whatever they use). Plus they only cost about 1 cent a piece!)