How Tortillas Lost Their Magic
Photographs by Victor Llorente
At about midnight each weekday, a group of five men and women arrives at the darkened restaurant doors of Sobre Masa in Brooklyn and performs a sacred art of transformation. Heirloom corn—hundreds of pounds in shades of blue, yellow, red—is boiled and steeped for hours in an alkaline solution, a process called nixtamalization. Then it’s rinsed, milled, aerated, and finally passed through a machine that cuts the resulting masa dough into perfect tortillas and griddles them. By 8 a.m. or so, the workers will have made about 1,000 pounds of masa and many hundreds of tortillas, which smell like popcorn and taste earthy and ancient.
The tortillas you might purchase at the grocery store or even your favorite Mexican restaurant probably don’t inspire the same level of spiritual awakening. Optimization for cost and convenience has made the average tortilla more redolent of cardboard than corn, designed not for flavor but to encase delicious fillings. But a growing group of chefs, restaurants, and companies are hoping to change that, to usher in a wave of masa made from single-origin, heirloom corn that restores the sanctity of Mexican culinary stalwarts such as tortillas and tamales.
The first time I tasted a tortilla that completely blew my mind, I was in Guatemala. At a street-corner stall beside Lake Atitlán, a woman was flipping small, puffy, blue discs on a comal; she sold me a thick stack, still toasty, packaged in a black plastic bag. Eating them was like tasting artisanal sourdough for the first time when all you’d ever had was Wonder Bread. Tortillas were a big part of my diet growing up in Southern California—from the grocery store, at my mom’s favorite Mexican market, and occasionally handmade by my great-grandma. But as I walked through the market in Santiago Atitlán, it occurred to me that for my entire life, I had been missing out.
The inhabitants of modern-day Mexico began cultivating corn some 9,000 years ago and discovered nixtamalization a few thousand years later. Our modern word for this alchemy descends from the Nahuatl words nextli (“ashes”) and tamalli (“corn dough”). When simmered in an alkaline broth, humble corn undergoes a remarkable physical and chemical alteration: Its outer hull breaks down and its starches turn gelatinous, not only making the grain tastier and easier to digest but also altering the protein structure so that essential nutrients such as niacin, calcium, and amino acids are easier for the body to absorb. Nixtamalization turns corn into a worthy dietary staple. Some anthropologists have argued that the process helped spur the rise of the great Mesoamerican societies such as the Maya and the Aztec. And when the tortilla became a mainstay, sometime after 300 B.C.E., its portability helped foster the growth of complex—and mobile—empires. The Aztec believed that the tortilla had a soul. One Maya tribe buried its dead with tortillas. Others believed the first humans sprang from corn dough. From corn, masa. And from masa, life.
Making masa the old-school way, though, is time intensive. So around the turn of the 20th century, an enterprising tortilla maker developed a way to make masa behave more like wheat flour, dehydrating and packaging it so that tortillas could be made quickly by just adding water. This innovation, called masa harina, eventually helped spread tortillas across the U.S. and the world, most notably by Gruma, the world’s largest manufacturer of corn flour (brand name: Maseca) and tortillas (Mission and Guerrero). It also made most tortillas taste like nothing; purists argue that the further processing strips them of nutrients. Small tortilla makers filed doomed antitrust lawsuits against Gruma; many went out of business.
As Gruma’s products—relatively tasteless, spectacularly convenient—proliferated, traditional tortilla making declined. My great-grandma was a Texas Mexican, and I have many fond memories of eating her buñuelos and tamales, but can remember virtually nothing about her tortillas. My mom couldn’t either. They were probably made from Maseca. At least until recently, for many Americans, tortillas made with commodity corn—and also masa harina, in many cases—were the only easily available option. Meanwhile, demand for tortillas has exploded. One report valued the 2023 U.S. tortilla market at $6.7 billion. Last year, Gruma alone had net U.S. sales of $3.6 billion.
[Read: The high-stakes world of Christmas tamales]
The market is so large, in fact, that artisanal producers have started to think they can squeeze in too. Sobre Masa—“about masa” in Spanish—opened in Brooklyn in 2021. It currently supplies about 50 restaurants in addition to its own and is in the midst of expanding its small in-restaurant tortilleria operation to a 5,000-square-foot space nearby. The restaurant rotates among 10 or so varieties of heirloom corn, much of which it sources from a Mexico-based wholesaler called Tamoa. “Our goal is really to elevate and bring more awareness to the ingredients that people don't necessarily see,” Zack Wangeman, the chef-owner of Sobre Masa, told me. In Portland, Oregon, Three Sisters Nixtamal sells fresh masa and tortillas locally and ships hominy, corn, and DIY nixtamalization kits nationally. Adriana Azcárate-Ferbel, one of the co-founders of Three Sisters, told me that she was inspired to start making tortillas because the products in the U.S. just didn’t match the quality of tortillas she grew up eating in Mexico. They were missing, as she put it, the “corn spirit.” Her mom would bring bags of Mexican tortillas on visits. “I would literally stockpile them in the freezer,” she said.
The breakout star of the artisanal masa movement is Masienda. Jorge Gaviria started the company a decade ago with the goal of creating, essentially, a classier version of Goya Foods. Masienda began by selling heirloom corn from Mexico to restaurants, and Gaviria had to teach many of his chef clients how to use it. Eventually, Masienda came up with its own heirloom spin on masa harina, and the consumer business took off online during the early days of the coronavirus pandemic. Whole Foods started carrying Masienda’s masa harina nationally in 2023, and ready-made frozen tortillas debuted this year, Gaviria told me. “We have seen a trend in recent years of customers wanting more authentic Mexican foods and ingredients. It's not just about Tex-Mex anymore,” Ana Maria Huertas Buitrago, a Whole Foods spokesperson, told me. Masienda’s masa harina has seen 73 percent growth this year compared with the same time last year, she said.
In his book Taco USA, the food journalist Gustavo Arellano writes that the tortilla “transmits heritage, race, class and beauty within its circular border.” To taste a tortilla made from heirloom corn is to get a little closer to its ancient roots, but that heritage is being marketed, at least right now, mostly to the economically advantaged shoppers at Whole Foods and diners at upscale Mexican joints. Masienda’s masa harina is infinitely more corn-y than Maseca; it’s also $12 for 2.2 pounds, compared with $6 for four pounds of Maseca at the Mexican grocer around the corner from me. Hispanic people earn less than almost any other ethnic group in the United States, according to a 2023 census report. Enrique Ochoa, a professor of Latin American studies at Cal State Los Angeles, called that mismatch a “fundamental contradiction.” The masa revolution is largely pricing out the descendants of the people who invented it, but Ochoa told me it’s also exciting. The tortilla has come a long way from the days of the Spanish conquistadors, who viewed masa as the unhealthy food of an uncivilized people and imported wheat instead. (That wheat, intended for bread, also gave rise to the flour tortilla.). Today, Mexican food—and most especially tortillas—are mainstays of the American diet even as Washington pursues policies to keep actual Mexicans out of the country.
[Read: The high-stakes world of Christmas tamales]
The masa entrepreneurs I interviewed spoke about making masa as a spiritual experience, a sort of communion with the elders who discovered how to coax from corn its incredible taste and nutritional value. In search of my own metaphysical experience, I bought some dried blue dent corn and soaked it in calcium hydroxide for nine hours until its thick outer skin peeled off. My tiny New York kitchen does not contain a molinito for milling masa or a metate for grinding it by hand, so I settled for a food processor. My extra-chunky masa became tamales, neat little packages that filled my apartment with the scent of corn as they steamed. They weren’t anything like the tamales I grew up eating, and yet they were still nostalgic—reminiscent of a time before me, when the tortillas of my ancestors tasted more like corn.