Grocery Store Tortillas are like Chevettes

     I've been making my own tortillas for nearly fifteen years.  Early on, I used masa harina (corn flour made from nixtamalized corn, then dried and milled to a very fine consistency) to make the dough, and for aficionados of corn tortillas, I offer this analogy:  eating grocery store tortillas is a bit like driving a Chevette*. It'll get you where you are going, but it's uncomfortable and not much fun to drive.  And here's the weird part - it's as if people are driving Chevettes around but think they are behind the wheel of a BMW.

    Fresh tortillas made from masa harina offer quite an upgrade over commercial corn tortillas (think a nice new Toyota Camry, reliable and pleasant to drive, but not exactly fun).

    But tortillas made from fresh masa, now that's the true BMW of the tortilla world.   They are pliable (you can crumple them in your fist, and when you let go, they flop open again without splitting), and if they are made right they are pliable even when reheated. They also have a wonderfully strong corn flavor and aroma.   But making them is undeniably a lot of work, particularly if you don't have the setup for it.

    I started making my own masa about 6 years ago, after my daughter got back from a school trip to Costa Rica and had tortillas made from fresh masa during a homestay with a Costa Rican family.  She urged us to try making them, because they were just so good (she was right).

    You start by nixtamalizing the corn, and that part's easy - you just cook the dried corn in an alkaline bath (about 1:3 corn to water by weight, plus a couple of heaping tsp of cal/pickling lime)  for 30-45 minutes, then let it sit overnight.

    Then you grind it. That's the hard part.   

    Over the years, I used the following methods: 

• The food processor (terrible - it can be used, but it dulls the blades, and to get the masa finely ground enough, you have to add a lot of water, and that results in a watery dough more akin to oatmeal in consistency. To turn it into dough, you have to add masa harina to soak up the additional water.
• An inexpensive Victoria molino (Spanish for mill). This has been my workhorse for the last six years. It's been around forever, and was designed specifically for making masa.  
• Wonder Mill Junior Deluxe, a very nice hand-cranked mill designed for dry grain that claims to handle masa, but it really doesn't work well for wet corn. Yeah, you can swap out the auger for one designed for masa, but the gloopy, cooked corn clogs the narrow throat, and you have to really shove the corn through.  It produces a nice enough masa, but it's much slower and far harder to crank than the Victoria.  Do yourself a favor, and if you want to make masa but don't want to spring for an electric mill, skip the WMJD and just get the Victoria, which is much cheaper anyway. 

    Once it's ground, you add water to the masa until it's the consistency of play dough, then you roll it into balls, squish it flat and cook it.  Make a stack of them and keep them wrapped in a dishtowel so they can steam a bit, then you are ready for taco Tuesday.

    Anyway, not long after I started making masa from scratch, we did a taste test: I bought a pack of fresh grocery store tortillas, made a small batch of tortillas from a masa-harina-based dough, and also made some from masa, and the difference was startling.  

    I once heard that the James Beard award-winning chef Ann Kim tasted masa-from-scratch tortillas that were so good they made her cry, and I believe it.  And here's the weird part: I was one of the people driving a Chevette but thinking it was a BMW.  Even the very best tortillas from the grocery store, which I loved for so many years, now taste like cardboard - but if you look at the ingredients, they have very nearly the same list as my from-scratch tortillas: Corn, lime, water (plus some preservatives and gums that I don't use).

    * Yes, my first car was indeed a Chevette. It had a four-speed manual transmission and no air conditioning.