I suspect there are food safety regulations here that would prohibit that sort of thing. It’s basically impossible to buy any kind of fresh baked good here without being given a bag or wrapper for it. Even if I ask the person behind the counter not to give me a bag, they won’t hand me, say, a cookie without providing their own wrapper/napkin/paper of some sort.
One local tortilleria here is open 24 hours Friday through Sunday. I don’t live in their neighborhood, but when I’ve gone there, there has certainly been high turnover. Even in my own neighborhood, when I buy tortillas they are usually still warm and steaming. I’ve also bought tortillas in small corner shops in Mexico, and I’m no expert, but I couldn’t taste the difference from the ones I buy here.
Seriously, what is your point? Are you trying to prove that the Mexican food in a city where there are more than half a million Mexicans isn’t as authentic as the same thing made in Mexico from the same ingredients?
I live in China, so I have to make my own tortillas if I want corn tortillas. We brought several kilograms of Maseca with us, and sometimes one of the Shanghai foreign food stores sells a Quaker version of masaharina. They’re incredibly easy to make.
Ah, but you asked about fresh tortillas. Yup, I’ve done that, too, using Alton Brown’s method. I had several grams of calcium hydroxide, and when I found some old, dried pozole corn (hominy?), I though that I’d make some tortillas. It worked quite well, and the tortillas and tostadas that I made were excellent.
I tried again with sweet, yellow corn, since that’s all I can buy in China. That didn’t work so well, because I didn’t dry out the corn first.
All in all, though, for the amount of work and time involved, using the Maseca is an excellent solution. It’s what most of the tortilla shops in Mexico use anyway.
Hominy has already been nixtamalized (treated with calcium hydroxide), so that step would have been unnecessary. For fresh tortillas that you want to nixtamalize yourself, you start with dried corn (usually white.) I don’t know exactly what you started with, but if it’s something labeled “hominy,” that’s not the right starting point. Here’s a picture of dried corn and then what it looks like after nixtamalization.
It’s actually a bit confusing, as it appears the lye/cal treatment is not a universal definition of “hominy,” so it depends on how they’re using the word. Seems the common theme is that hominy is corn that’s been hulled and stripped of bran and germ.
