Nixtama-Wha?!?

So how excited was I to learn how to make tortillas?

There are only two ingredients: corn masa harina and water. Corn masa is traditionally made by a process called nixtamalization, in which corn kernels are soaked and cooked in lime-water, de-hulled, and ground into a dough (or dried and ground into a flour, called masa). **Don't try it with plain cornmeal, all you'll get is a mess!** Corn treated in this manner is known in North America as hominy. Some, including Wikipedia, cite this process as the foundation for the civilizations of the Americas (North and South), since the combination with lime-water makes bio-available the niacin and essential amino acids that corn alone lacks, creating a complete protein. When Europeans took to using maize, they skipped the nixtamalization process, and the maize-dependent cultures on that continent consistently developed protein-deficiency diseases.

Sadly, the Maseca we're buying here in the U.S. doesn't even approximate the real masa. Read this article from Grist and add another notch to the "how messed up can the world's food economy get?" belt.

That said, these blow store-bought corn tortillas out of the lime water. We never quite figured out the ratio of masaharina to water--it kept changing! There was the 1 c masa to 11/8 c water on a label, but then we got 2.25 c masa to 1.5 c water, and another time 2 c masa to 11/8-11/3 c masa (which is close to the last ratio, right?). So we just went by feel. Once the water is thoroughly mixed in, the dough should be just wet enough to shape into balls. The real test is in the pressing. Place a dough ball between two ziploc bags to press into shape. Cracks will form around the outer edge, try to correct those before you keep enlarging the dough circle. The test is removing the circle--it's often a close call, but if it sticks completely to the ziploc, it's too wet. If the cracks are unmanageably large, the dough is too dry.

Hat's off to Andrea for bringing this process into our lives. And also for being so hardcore that she's going to try using woodash to make her own masa from corn she grows.