Troy down at Preparing Wisely thought I should try out one of their 25lb bags of Organic Yellow Corn. Yes Sir. I aim to please. I was happy to take it home. Honestly, this is some beautiful stuff. I have had a lot of fun playing with it.
Did you know there are more than 400 kinds of corn?! If you've never worked with dry corn, you may also be interested to know that I needed something to help make the corn digestable.
Nixtamalization is the process needed To make the corn masa. You will need to purchase something traditionally called "slaked lime", but chemically called
Calcium hydroxide. Tory had some that took home too.
It's available for 5$ a lb
here. When corn is not treated with the lime, it has an outer husk-fiber-type stuff that makes it very difficult to digest. The dough will also not hold together at all. It must come off. Place 8 cups of corn in a 3 gallon pot with warm water and 3/4 cup of lime. Cover with 3 inches of water over the corn.
Simmer at least 45 minutes. It will bubble and foam quite a bit.
What really surprised me was how bright orange the corn got at first.
After 45 minutes it will start to split and the outer skin will start to slip off rather easily. Almost slippery. Run the corn under a forceful stream of water. Rubbing between your hands.
This is how you wash the corn.
As you rinse you will see a lot of this clear film left in your colander . It is the inedible portion of the corn.
Separate the edible corn from the outer fibers.
Run the edible portion through a meat grinder fit with the finest setting.
I run it through once...
It looked pretty course at this point so I ran it through again with a little water.
It should hold together like this.
The dough will look like this.
With a tortilla press, between two pieces of wax paper and place on a hot lightly oiled griddle.
Cooking 3-5 minutes.
Serve warm.
There you go. Tortillas of love. Now, for the record, masa doesn't keep very well so if you don't plan on using it within a day or so, put the unused dough in the freezer and use within a month.
3 comments:
Que maravilla! un poco trabajoso pero el resultado lo merece.
Can you grind that kind of corn into corn meal? Or does that inedible skin make it not useable that way?
You could technically, however it would be a totally different texture and because of the added fiber, be very difficult to keep the tortillas together, if not impossible.
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