(Describer) Soaked kernels are ground.

[upbeat music]

Lay it down like this, and then pull your hand away, and then, and then, ooh, wow. [laughs]

(Describer) Blue-gray tortilla dough sticks and folds.

-Womp, womp. -It's fine. People think tortillas are so easy, but I always tell 'em it actually takes a lot of nuance to make a really good tortilla. I'm seeing that.

(Describer) Cecila Phillips:

A great corn tortilla couldn't be any more simple. We're talking corn, water, maybe some salt, but the end result is magic. The charring, the texture, it immediately makes everything it touches just taste better. Now, the corn tortilla you get off the shelf, you probably know is not the freshest, but even the tortilla from your favorite Mexican restaurant that makes them fresh daily still might not be the best tortilla you could have. And that's because most are made from some version of mass produced masa harina. It's corn flour, which basically means dehydrated corn. But we can do better, because a better corn tortilla already exists and has existed for thousands of years. All you need is fresh corn and an ancient science that's almost as old as civilization itself.

(Describer) Title: Beyond the Menu. With different colors of corn:

The Olotillo varietal is a really big broad kernel. If I want something sturdier, I'll go with a Bolita varietal, and this one is a North American varietal called Red Butcher. Ends up being a little firmer, it's a little denser.

(Cecilia) Say hello to Emmanuel.

(Describer) …Galvan.

If you're looking for the perfect corn to make the perfect tortilla, he's definitely your guy. Masa is a dough made from maize. And when I started traveling New Mexico as an adult, I started seeing a lot more places use fresh milled masa. And I was always blown away by the flavor, the aroma that just elevated every single dish. And it was very hard to find in the U.S. What you can find easily are these prepackaged grocery store tortillas. The ones that you find in the supermarket are awful.

[laughs] They're just awful.

(Describer) José R Ralat:

When a restaurant says that they make their own tortillas, it's probably made from a corn powder. Don't believe the code word.

(Cecilia) Emmanuel's masa is different. He's trying to take it back to its roots.

(José) Fresh masa is the backbone of Mexican cuisine, and it's very important to the entire diet of Latin America and Mesoamerica. And it helped establish Mexico as the country that it is. The Maya sacred text, known as "The Popol Vuh" notes that humans were made of corn. So quintessentially, Mesoamericans, specifically Mexicans, are people of corn. It is central to their identity. But before Mexico was Mexico and before corn was corn, it was just a simple, wild grass. The closest wild relatives of maize are referred to as teosinte.

(Describer) Jeffery Ross-Ibarra:

And it used to be thought that corn came from a single one of those wild relatives and we showed that really, it was sort of a combination of two of those during the history of maize that gave rise to modern corn. So sort of two different wild grasses coming together. About 4,000 years ago, throughout much of Mesoamerica, maize starts becoming important staple crop for many different indigenous civilizations or indigenous groups. But just plain old corn isn't enough to form the foundation of a society. It needs to be unlocked by a scientific process called nixtamalization.

(Describer) Galvan:

Nixtamalization is the process of cooking maize and soaking it and chemically altering it to make masa. So we bring water up to a boil, and then we turn the temperature down. And then to that water, we're gonna add cal. -So go ahead and add the cal. -And it's short for?

(Emmanuel) Calcium hydroxide.

(Describer) A powder.

Is there any danger to the human face with the... -Not to the face. -Okay. As you can tell by my face, there's no danger to it. So it's very active. You'll see it's starting to bubble even more. It's kind of reacting to the water. Now we're gonna go ahead and add the maize. And so, the chemical reaction that's happening, is alkaline, right? -Yes. -So tell me more about that. It's the opposite of acidic. It's very, very basic. And that basic-ness of the solution is gonna start breaking down the maize almost instantaneously. The cal penetrates adding calcium, breaking down some of the starches, making all the amino acids and vitamins that are in maize available to your body. -You give it a stir. -Yeah. And lift up the maize, you can see it went from blue and white -Whoa! -To blue and yellow. Look at the color.

(Cecilia) Okay, let's keep talking corn. Remember how Jeff said that corn started being domesticated around 4,000 years ago? Well, apparently it wasn't going well. Maize itself is a horribly nutritionally deficient plant. And so maize needs some sort of fortification before it can become a staple. Or you know, people are just not gonna be able to survive on it. It's not nutritious enough.

(Describer) Amber VanDerwarker:

At some point, we see this huge leap in the abundance of maize. Sometime around 800 BC-ish, we think it was at this point that people innovated nixtamalization. Now, obviously back then, they couldn't just grab a bag of calcium hydroxide. They needed something else to get nixtamalization going. And in Mesoamerica, usually that was ground limestone, 'cause limestone outcrops were very abundant. The whole Mayan world is built on a limestone base, and also wood ash. You boil it for hours, and the alkalinity of the wood ash and/or the lime unlocks nutrients that are sort of deeply locked into the maize. And then often, they would then grind it. And that's how you get masa, masa for making tamales, and then masa for tortillas and the like.

(Describer) Kernels are reddish-brown, yellow and dark purple. With Galvan:

[upbeat music]

Okay, so this has just been soaking, wow, for 24 hours. -You wanna try one? -Yeah? Yeah. Completely edible at this point. Okay.

[upbeat music]

(Describer) They each taste a blue-gray and yellow kernel.

-Still has some crunch to it. -A little bit. And it's dry, but it seems much softer than what we started with. Because it hasn't fully penetrated into the maize. We want it sort of to be saturated, but not cooked all the way through. Otherwise we end up with a really like mushy masa that's not gonna be ideal. -We don't want that. -No.

(Cecilia) After straining out what seems like endless ladles of the stuff, it's time to move onto my favorite part-- the grinding.

(Describer) Two stone pucks sit on a machine.

[upbeat music]

Made our way over to this massive machine. What are we working with here? This is a grinder. It does one thing-- it grinds maize. All right, so these stones are what make the machine come together and they're heavy. How much does that weigh? Yeah, these are about 20 pounds or so. So even though we're like working with a really state-of-the-art machine, this is still made from volcanic stones. It's hand-carved. They make the masa. They make the texture. They knead, they break the corn apart, they grind it.

(Describer) He puts them in the machine.

So, without the stones, you won't have the same product. Finally, it's fresh masa time. -This lever here? [laughs] -This lever. Okay, go for it. -[machine grinding] -[upbeat music]

(Describer) With water running, Galvan guides the maïs down through a hopper. Phillips watches it come out the bottom with the texture of wet sand.

So this is just straight up, fresh masa.

(Describer) They form balls with it.

Smells so good and the color, color's so beautiful of this one. If this looks intense, imagine doing it all by hand, which is how people used to do it before industrialization. So it's not hard to see the appeal of dehydrated masa, or, as it's known by its most popular brand, Maseca.

(José) Maseca was introduced as a cheaper, faster option.

(Describer) Ralat:

It was not liked at first. But now, if you talk to Mexicans of a certain generation, they'll say that's what they grew up with and they loved it. You can tweak it and you can make it actually pretty good if it's fresh. Eventually, it just overtook because it was shoved down people's throats. It was what was at the table. And if you left a tortilla, your mother would probably scold you. So there's nothing wrong with using masa harina, but according to José, when it's mass-produced... What you get is this sort of aluminum-tasting, overly-sweet tortilla, which might look nice, but doesn't taste nice, doesn't have the elastic properties of nixtamalized corn. You could argue that the industrialization of corn has removed Mexicans from the ground upon which their ancestors tread.

(Emmanuel) I would always get incredibly excited when my mom would say, "I'm making fresh tortillas."

(Describer) Galvan:

She would just grab a bag of Maseca from the shelf, mix it with water. But that to us as kids, was like huge improvement from what we were buying at the store. It must feel pretty good to be able to make something like this from scratch. My parents didn't understand why I was choosing to make masa my like business or life, and then they finally gotta try it, and then they're like, "Oh, I get it now. "You're making something that's like, "doesn't really exist right now and I haven't had in decades." You know? So, it does feel really good to kind of bringing those memories back to people. -[burn ignites] -[techno music]

(Describer) He puts dough into a press, then in a pan to cook them.

You want to taste the tortilla? -Yes. -Okay.

(Cecilia) I want one of the fresh ones. -Yeah. -Is it appropriate to share? -We can share a tortilla. -Okay. Yeah, we can kind of tear it in half. Great.

(Describer) They each taste a half.

There's a lot minerality to it. The blues naturally have more antioxidants. See, they have more of like a grassy minerality to them than some of the other varietals. Super earthy. I love this one. I love the tiny little bit of salt that's in there. It definitely offsets it. -Mm. -Yeah. Brings out the natural flavor. These are great. -But this isn't all you do. -No. -I heard you make tetelas? -Mm hm.

(Cecilia) And I've never even heard of what a tetela is.

(Emmanuel) A tetela is a triangular masa pocket with fillings inside. Traditionally, there's like molé or cheese and beans inside of it, but we're gonna make a really simple vegetarian one with braised collared greens.

(Describer) She presses a ball of blue-gray and yellow doughs combined. With wax paper, she folds the tortilla around the filing and cooks.

[upbeat music]

First part done. [laughs] Beautiful. Look at that. Perfect. I can feel the love that we put into this today. [laughs] -A whole day of work. -Yes. But they look beautiful. Look at the inside. It looks so good. It's like pillowy light, but it does hold up. -It's not like falling apart. -Yeah. This is such an old process and I'm really excited to see what people do -with it on a personal level. -That's amazing. Well, I'm glad I got to learn about it today. Thanks for coming. -Yeah. -Yeah. Now I'm gonna eat my tetela. -Me too. -Okay.

[both chuckling]

So, corn tortillas, they have a deep history, but it's not the only ancient food to come out of Mexico. Check out our episode on birria. It's way older than you think. But before you do that, don't forget to like, subscribe, and tell us what dishes we should explore next "Beyond The Menu."

(Describer) She throws a tortilla like a frisbee at the camera.

[laughs]

-(Crew) Cool. -Did it cover the lens? No? That would've been so perfect if I had hit like right in the lens. Accessibility provided by the U.S. Department of Education.

(Describer) Accessibility provided by the US Department of Education.