Hey all you fruitcakes…
Fruitcake lovers, I mean. It’s after Halloween, which means that if you love a good English-style fruitcake, it’s time to start production. Two months or so of aging is pretty much perfect, so…get cracking!
READ ONMás y Más Masa
One thing about nixtamalized corn: once you start going down that road, it’s hard to stop. There are simply so many local, regional and national variations on the theme, as reader Rebecca’s email illustrates: That arepas recipe looks very similar to my experience of the Mexican gordita. Basically, they’re masa griddled as little fat cakes […]
READ ONMaking Arepas
Uh oh, this is the third hero shot in a row to include the Authenticity Towel. I’d better watch myself, or bits of pre-Colombian pottery and stone tools are going to start creeping into my pictures. A few months from now you won’t be able to tell me from Marths Stewart Living. Lord help me […]
READ ONMasa at Home
I found a very interesting tutorial at Gourmet Sleuth on making masa at home. Two things about it caught my attention. First, that it calls for dent corn, also known as “field corn” here in the Midwest. Dent corn is so-named because the corn kernels have little dimples in the top. It’s extremely common in […]
READ ONMaking Corn Tortillas
For years I avoided making corn tortillas, for the simple reason that I’d never been able to shape them without getting huge cracks. Much later I learned an easy trick that helps the tortilla maker figure out whether the dough has enough water in it. It worked like a charm. Oh, the wasted years. Begin […]
READ ONOn Hominy
One thing I forgot to mention yesterday is that nixtamalized corn remains an important part of the American diet to this day, and not just because tortillas have become a staple bread. Northern Native Americans also grew and harvested corn, and like their Mesoamerican counterparts, treated it with ashes or lime. Once it was cooked […]
READ ONToy with a Thousand Uses IV
Reader Scott writes: Use number n + 1 for your sous vide machine: maize nixtamalization. Add calcium hydroxide and protease enzymes and set the sous vide to mid 50’s C for efficient proteolytic activity! Holy cow, I had no idea this thing was so versatile! Hear that, honey? Your husband just bought us a miracle […]
READ ONNixtamalization and Nutrition
The functional advantages of nixtamalization are just the beginning of what the process brought to the ancient Mesoamericans. For in the process of making their corn easier to handle and eat, Mesoamerican cooks accidentally unleashed a torrent of nutrients that would otherwise have been unavailable to them. For nixtamalization, it turns out, vastly increases the […]
READ ONOil in Flour Tortillas
Reader Mary Sue writes: My abuelita began making her white flour tortillas with cooking oil instead of shortening after my abuelito’s third heart attack. She uses about 1/3rd of a cup of oil, these days canola or sunflower. Of course, it being a grandmother recipe, she’s been eyeballing it for decades and there’s no actual […]
READ ONWhat’s the difference between corn meal and corn masa?
It’s a good question, because on an intuitive level one would think that if a corn tortilla is a simple pancake made of ground corn, there really shouldn’t be that much difference between finely ground corn meal and masa harina (literally “dough flour”). In reality there’s a huge difference, which can be summed up in […]
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