Subject: Re: Ash washing corn

From: [email-masked] (Ricardo J Salvador)
Date: Sat, 15 May 1993 03:21:56 GMT

In article <[email-masked]> [email-masked] writes:
>
>There has been some discussion lately in rec.food.cooking, rec.food.historic,
>and rec.food.veg about ash washing corn.  (Treating corn grain with lye 
>water or lime water or ash water to prepare it for grinding before making
>masa or tortillas etc.)
>
>No one was able to give a precise description of the process or a recipe.
>I am wondering if anyone in any of these groups 
>would be able to provide more information.  Thanks.

This topic is dealt with in the appended file extracted from the 
soc.culture.mexican FAQ.  I'll add that in Mexican markets one can
find lime (sold as 'tequisquite,' -derived from Nahuatl, the Aztec 
language) for the making of hominy, the preparatory step for making
tortillas.  A pinch to a fistful is used per potful, which I guesstimate
to hold about 6 liters of water and maybe 2.5 to 3 kg of corn grain.

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What is the recipe for the tortilla?

>I am looking for a recipe to prepare the tortilla for enchiladas,
>assuming I cannot find any ready-to-make crust. I would like to
>use basic ingredients only, e.g. flour, etc.

I wish it were as simple as giving you a recipe.  The tortilla takes
some serious work and time to manufacture.  Maybe the least heart-
breaking recommendation I can pass along is for you to hunt in your basic
"ethnic food store" for a bag of processed corn meal by either of the
labels "Masaharina" or "Maseca" (actually, if you have any
sort of Mexican population in Toronto, you may not need to look
beyond the Mexican foods section of your regular grocery store), then
follow the instructions on the bag.  However, I can almost guarantee
that the first few times you go through the procedure your tortillas
will be less than satisfactory : (Mexican women who make their own
tortillas (these days, this is mostly in rural areas) go through an appren-
ticeship that lasts for years, beginning as little girls, to learn how
to make a truly fine tortilla.  For what it's worth though, we've
found that Maseca flour usually gives the best results in terms of
consistence and flavor (products made with Masaharina tend to go
stale and rancid sooner, indicating that the oil content of this flour
must be higher than Maseca's).

If you were truly to begin from scratch, you'd get some white corn grain
and set it to low boil in a covered pot with some slaked lime or
wood ashes. This process will loosen the "skins" (pericarp) of
the kernels, and you'd find most of these skins floating at the
top of the steep liquor next morning.  Also, the alkaline solution
has the side effect of making bound niacin in the corn endosperm
soluble, and therefore available as a nutrient (this is important
to folks who depend on corn as their staple source of nutrients; in Mexico
annual per capita consumption of tortillas is about 410 lb., or as you can
see, a little over 1 lb. per day, and in rural areas it is estimated that
tortillas provide about 70% of the caloric intake).  You would discard the
supernate and the steep liquor itself; then wash the remaining "naked"
kernels (consisting mostly of pure starch) and embryos ("germs," where
most of the oil is concentrated).  However, if you wanted to avoid this
whole process and start from this point on, you could look for 'hominy' in
your local grocery store, since this is precisely what hominy is.

Next, you'd get hold of a grinding stone utensil (known in Mexico
as 'metate,') and you'd begin slaving over the corn grain with a pestle and
a jug of water by your side.  In the course of grinding the grain
you're homogenizing and gelatinizing the starch, protein and germ,
and also somewhat dehydrating it; however, you must add water
continuously to make the resulting mixture pliable.  When you are done,
you'll have a dough that you will work into small balls from which you'll
shape your tortillas.  This step takes between half an hour to an hour,
depending on how many tortillas you are making.  If you would want to
dispense with this step, then use the Maseca flour mentioned above.  This
is essentially the dough in dehydrated state, ready for you to
rehydrate and shape your tortillas.

Shaping and cooking the tortilla is a key step, and the one where
the greatest skill is involved.  What you are trying to do is
create as thin and round a patty of the dough as possible.  As
you work it, you will be further dehydrating the mixture.  The
trick is to lose only so much water in this step and in the next, which
involves baking both sides of the tortilla for 30 to 60 seconds on a hot
griddle, so that the resulting product has a specific water content when
done (about 40% moisture, this is crucial), making it soft and pliable.
The tortilla should puff as you bake it, but if air bubbles form in the dough
as it bakes, or if is too wet and pasty, or too dry and burns or is toasted as
it bakes, then the resulting tortilla is ruined.  As you can imagine, Indian
women who mass-produce tortillas three times a day don't stop to think
about baking time or moisture content, they have simply developed the
knack to know when the dough is ready and how much baking to allow.
Also, it is no easy matter to form a round tortilla in the limited amount of
time you have between grinding/kneading the dough, patting it out, and
having to lay it on the griddle before it dries excessively.  Experienced
Indian women in Mexico are a wonder to watch as they do this using
nothing but their hands (no flat surface) as they pat out perfect circles
between their palms.  If you wanted to avoid this step, then you'd go buy a
"tortilla press," which is a couple of round metal or wooden sheets that you
press by means of a lever.  You place a doughball on one of the sheets,
press, then cut off the dough extruded from the press, leaving a round
sheet of dough inside the press; OR you could go buy 'industrial tortillas' in
the frozen foods section of your grocery store.

There is no industrial tortilla that can compare with the baked and ready-
to-eat article, as you might expect.  To facilitate the mechanization of the
process a number of compromises are made.  Most industrial processes
begin with a flower base such as Maseca, create large batches of the
dough, pass it through rollers to create the flattened cake, then actually
_cut out_ a perfectly round tortilla, which is then paraded through several
series of conveyor belts passing through an oven and then open ventilated
space, to allow for cooling and water loss, before packing in plastic bags
which are then frozen and shipped.  The weak link in the whole process is
that tortillas don't last in storage and lose their flavor in a hurry when
aged/frozen.  The main reason is that their oil content leads to them
becoming sour, and the freezing process used in the US leads to water
condensation on the tortillas themselves, which _always_ makes them
pasty and mushy when you try to use them again at room temperature.

Now then, let's say that you've either made or purchased your tortillas and
are ready to make your enchiladas.  This is a dish whose name means that
you've "chilified" some tortillas.  "Chili" is derived from the Aztec name for
what you call a "chili pepper."  Following is a recipe for enchiladas that I
give with some hesitation.  It was collected from rural Indian women near
the vicinity of Puebla, Mexico, and the instructions are sparce and most
useful for cooks of whom great familiarity with Mexican cooking can be
assumed (Recetario de Maiz, CP, CEICADAR, 1990.  Translation and all
errors of same are my fault!)

RED ENCHILADAS (Enchiladas Rojas)

Ingredients:

18 tortillas
8 dried red chilis (chile ancho, translator's note: Capsicum annum)
1 onion
2 cloves garlic
1.5 cups cheese (translator's note, in US try Monterrey Jack or Muenster)
2 pepper seeds (translator's note:  Piper nigrum)
1 stick cinammon
2 cloves
Radishes to suit
1 lettuce head
Cooking oil
Salt to suit

Preparation:

Dice onion and shred cheese

Clean and rinse chilis, grind together with clove, cinammon, garlic, pepper
and salt.

Fry tortillas and dip in sauce prepared above, fill with cheese, roll, stack on
tray and garnish with lettuce.

Of course, if you wanted to dispense with the trouble, you could go buy
frozen enchiladas in the frozen foods section of your grocery store, and
then you are time ahead, but culinary experience far, far behind.

Two more related items for your interest.  First, the recipe for tortillas as
given by Indian women themselves (from above cited work), then a brief
lexicon of words related to the tortilla making process.

TORTILLAS

Ingredients:

4.25 pecks of white corn (Translator's note:  5 "maquilas")
100 grams (Translator's note:  about 3.5 oz) limestone

Utensils:

Metate (Translator's note:  stone mortar and pestle)
Tortilla press (Translator's note: _anyone_ can make a tortilla this way ;)
Plastic sheets of slightly larger diameter than tortilla press
Griddle

Preparation:

Cook corn in a can or pot with water and limestone (Translator's note, this
takes hours, and is typically left overnight)

When the corn skins can be peeled remove from fire and add more water.
Cover and allow to "steam cook."

Rinse corn and grind to make dough.

Mix well and make small dough balls.  Place on tortilla press between
plastic sheets to avoid sticking.  Press tortilla and bake on griddle.

Turn twice and remove when "puffed."

Now then, if you're going to be looking at recipes involving tortillas, there
are a number of words that are certain to come up.  Following is a basic
lexicon to help understand these:

TORTILLA - Name given by Spaniards to the corn-based flat-bread they
found in use in Mexico.  This literally means "smallish and flattened," (for
instance, it is what a Spaniard would call an egg omelette).  Native names
differed, but in three major languages it was:  TLAXCALLI (Aztec), YET
(Zapotec), WEJ (Maya).

CENTLI - Aztec for "corn."  Ordinal number meaning literally "first," ETL
(bean) is second, etc.  Used as particle when distinguishing varieties of corn
(as in cacahuaCENTLI, tepeCENTLI, etc.)

METATE - From Aztec "Metatl."  Stone mortar used to grind corn.  Made
from basaltic stone.  It turns out to be an essential part of the tortilla
making process for a number of reasons.  One is that as a soft volcanic
stone, the basalt wears easily and actually helps to disrupt ungelatinized
starch by becoming _part_ of the dough, in small minute particles.  This is
so essential for the making of good dough that even in modern industrial
processes, the corn is ground with basaltic stone grinders.  Second, this
incorporated basaltic stone is thought to account for the excellent dental
health and hygiene shown by Indians, whose teeth are cleaned abrasively
as they eat tortillas.

NIXTAMAL - The "naked" corn grains, or "hominy" remaining after
removing kernel skins in alkaline bath.

NEJAYOTE - The steep liquor in wich corn grains are bathed to remove
skins.

TONEUHCAYOTL - From Aztec:  "our flesh," the dough made from the
ground corn, known also by Spanish name "MASA."  Reflecting both that
this was the common starting point for a number of essential staple foods
(tortillas, tamales, etc.), and also the belief that human beings were made
by the gods from corn dough (which I personally find more flattering than
being made of dirt, as the myth of another small tribe elsewhere would
have us believe ;)

TESTAL - From Aztec:  "testalli," the dough ball from which tortillas are
patted out

COMAL - From Aztec:  "comalli," the clay or metal griddle on which tortillas
are baked

TENATE - From Aztec:  "tenatl," the basket made from woven dried leaves
that is used to keep tortillas warm after baking and before consumption

>I am also looking for recipes to prepare other type of tortillas
>for example the nacho one, or the burrito one.

These aren't really "other types of tortillas."  Nachos, for instance, are
unknown in Mexico.  The closest thing might be a "totopo" or perhaps a
"tostada."  A totopo is a tortilla that is made with salt in the dough and is
then baked dry, rather than pliable.  This toasted tortilla was made
specifically for travellers, as it keeps without spoiling.  A tostada is a
thoroughly post-conquest confection (Indian cooking before the conquest
did not include a number of ingredients/procedures that are  now closely
associated with "Mexican food," such as frying, cheese, etc.)  You make
tostadas with a coarser dough than for tortillas.  You make "chips" by
shaping the dough and then deep-fat frying it.  Deep-fat frying is a way of
quickly dehydrating a food.  Coarser dough allows for water vapor to
escape the dough quickly and so minimizes air bubbles in the resulting
"tostadas."  These corn chips are pretty oily things, and this is essentially
what Frito-Lay and similar outfits have invented and christened "Nachos"
in the US.

A burrito is a taco made with a _wheat_ flour tortilla.  A taco is our
"sandwich," in other words it is a generic food item made by rolling up any
ingredient that you please within a tortilla, just as you consider anything
you slap in between two slices of bread to be a sandwich.  That stiff
concoction made with a greasy "saddle" shell that you call a taco in the US
is a purely industrial invention unkown in Mexico.  When the "tortilla" is
made from wheat flour, producing a thick, white flat-bread, then the taco
you make from it is a "burrito."  Wheat flour tortillas and burritos are
specific to northern Mexico and are unknown and/or disliked in
central/southern Mexico, where corn rules.  If you ask for a burrito in the
latter region, you'd be asking for a four-legged beast.

==================================================================
(***EDITORS' NOTE:  For futher information on this topic see FAQ
"BURRITOS" on this same subdirectory.)
==================================================================

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