Eating a corn tortilla made from freshly ground dough can be a sublime experience, each bite hinting at flavors of toasted corn and earthy minerals. It’s so good that at Cosme, chefs Daniela Soto-Innes and Enrique Olvera’s acclaimed restaurant in the Flatiron District, customers eat hundreds every day. The tortillas have been celebrated in reviews; the Times likened the smell to “flowers, bread straight from the oven, and a baby’s cheek at the same time.” The cook who makes them at many dinner services — and who makes them the fastest — is Guadalupe Peláez, a short, powerful Oaxacan woman who can churn out up to 3,000 in a busy night. Her secret is pressing out two at a time and unfurling both onto the grill at once. She can cook up to 60 simultaneously, flipping each by hand.
“Mis dedos están sellados,” she jokes. Rough translation: My fingers have been sealed/calloused by all the burns.
Peláez is one of a small number of New York City kitchen workers who have been hired to make tortillas, part of a growing interest in a better-tasting version of this Mexican staple food. In recent years, reflecting a trend happening nationally, more and more New York City Mexican restaurants have zeroed in on it, swapping out what were once papery, slightly sour-smelling discs for tortillas made from freshly nixtamalized and ground corn. At restaurants like Cosme, Atla, Rosie’s, Claro, and Casa Pública, these tortillas taste far better, but they also cost a lot more — think of packaged, sliced bread versus bread made from scratch with good-quality wheat flour.
Nixtamalizing, an age-old method that calls for cooking and soaking corn kernels in an alkaline solution, is one of the main reasons why. When done correctly, the process stretches over two days and requires an actual human to taste a few kernels to see if they’re cooked enough. Someone must then load the corn into the stone-ground mill and eyeball the amount of water added to make sure the dough is not too wet and not too dry. After that, the dough must be kneaded, sometimes rolled, and pressed out. Cosme has three workers who spend more than two hours a day weighing and rolling balls of masa, so Peláez can arrive and immediately start pressing them out.
While chefs who nixtamalize in-house are often responsible for creating and tweaking their exact masa recipe — different ratios of corn, calcium hydroxide (known as cal in Spanish), and water produce vastly different results — in most cases in New York City, it’s Mexican immigrant women from tiny, rural towns charged with actually handling the masa. They’re the ones, historically and culturally, who carry this knowledge in their country. Utilizing the skills they learned from their mothers or grandmothers, they judge when the dough is moist enough and when the tortilla is perfectly cooked. And for many women, the job also hints at something else: the chance to connect to the culture they deeply miss.
Peláez grew up making tortillas in Cacahuatepec, Oaxaca, a small town near the border of Guerrero. Her kitchen had a tin roof and an open-air stove, and during the annual corn harvest, there’d be ears of all colors: white, red, blue, yellow. She’d make tortillas twice a day and often eat them with the village’s local vegetables, she says, such as squash, green beans, purslane, and native Mexican greens.
She started at Cosme two years ago; in her previous gig at another New York City restaurant she hadn’t touched food at all, instead cleaning tables and floors. On a recent evening, in a relatively isolated corner of Cosme’s basement kitchen next to the large pots of foaming, nixtamalized corn, Peláez opened the restaurant’s heavy, battered sheet-metal press (the lid probably weighed at least seven pounds) and slapped two balls of dough on one side. She closed it and pushed the lever down once, twice, three times — necessary to achieve the tortilla’s characteristic thinness. Then, with a speed that belied how difficult it was, she unfurled both circles of shiny, almost transparent dough onto her outstretched hand and wrist. Within seconds, she inverted both onto the grill.
Making tortillas from scratch is not an easy task. First, the masa must be moist and pliable enough to even do the work. If it’s too wet, the tortillas will stick to the plastic and won’t peel off. The cooking requires skill, too. Tortillas left on the grill seconds too long become dry and hard. If the grill is slightly too hot, or the tortillas pressed a millimeter or two too thick, they can burn on the outside and taste raw in the middle. Fresh tortillas must also be cooked and pressed out simultaneously, requiring a near-constant dance of pressing, unfurling the raw tortilla into one’s hand, laying it gently on the grill, flipping, removing, and observing — be it five, six, seven, 12, or in the case of Peláez, up to 60 tortillas a time. All practiced tortilla makers are looking for the key metric in a good corn tortilla: that it inflates on the grill. In Mexico, there’s a saying that if your tortilla inflates, you’re ready to get married.
New York restaurant managers and chefs acknowledge that men can cook tortillas, too, with practice. And traditionally, both men and women play an important role in the tortilla’s creation. Men typically cultivate the corn and lead the harvest.
But it’s Mexican women and children who’ve historically nixtamalized and ground corn, then shaped them by hand for the tortilla’s entire estimated 2,000-year existence, says Rafael Mier, founder of the Fundación Tortilla de Maíz Mexicana, which seeks to restore the importance of the corn tortilla in the Mexican diet. “It’s an ancestral knowledge that comes from grandmothers, mothers, daughters,” Mier says.
That history persists in New York restaurants. At East Village restaurant Rosie’s, María Fuentes and two co-workers press out between 600 and 700 tortillas on a busy night. Fuentes grew up making tortillas with her mother and grandmother, cooking them on a wood-fired clay comal in Acaxtlahuacán, Puebla. She moved to New York 11 years ago, not knowing that the city had restaurants that prepared tortillas the way she did in Mexico. But last year, she got the job at Rosie’s. Her station, meant to mimic what you’d see at a Mexican market or a restaurant like El Bajío in Mexico City, is in the center of the dining room.
“It’s something we bring from Mexico, imagine that. And to return to make them here?” She laughed, a little incredulous at her luck.
Luz María Bravo Onofre has been making tortillas in the kitchen at Casa Pública in Williamsburg for about a year, using masa sourced from Yonkers tortillería La Milpa de Rosa. She grew up participating in the corn harvest in her hometown of Ahuehuetitla, Puebla, on her family’s small farm. Every year they would dry the ears of corn in the sun, and then they’d scrape the kernels off the cob, nixtamalize them, and grind them into dough.
Bravo’s family would make all kinds of things with the masa — fresh tortillas, picaditas (a type of large, thick tortilla with a raised edge) with crema and salsa, or, she said with excitement creeping into her voice, memelas de manteca, an oblong patty of masa mixed with lard that’s either grilled or fried. Making tortillas at Casa Pública is not much different than what she did in Ahuehuetitla, although there, her stove was wood-fired and the tortillas cooked on a clay comal. And of course, even though La Milpa de Rosa nixtamalizes and grinds its own corn, the flavor of those tortillas is not the same. Bravo’s hometown tortillas carry the terroir of her village, and without the clay comal, which is traditionally sealed with cal, the tortillas here don’t soak up the same earthy, mineral flavors, let alone the faint flavor of woodsmoke. She misses the taste so much, her mother will occasionally send her tortillas from Ahuehuetitla in the mail, she says.
“Here, I like to do it because I feel like I’m there,” says Bravo, 27. “Sometimes I’ll make one and I’ll eat it, and I feel like I’m not letting go of where I’m from.”
But the process is an art that isn’t as robust as it once was. Changing demographics in Mexico, a push to buy ready-made tortillas, and the lack of prestige of Mexican indigenous culture mean that fewer people than ever are making and eating fresh tortillas, Mier says. “Unfortunately now, this ancestral knowledge is breaking up. Women and men are losing the capacity to make tortillas,” he says.
Making tortillas in New York City also comes with its own particular set of challenges. Casa Pública chef-owner Bob Truitt says though he’d love to be able to nixtamalize and grind corn in-house, the restaurant doesn’t have the space. He’s also skeptical that customers will spend money on good-quality tortillas when there’s still a perception in New York that Mexican food should be cheap.
There are cultural differences, too. The restaurant used to send out homemade tortillas with every entree, as is done in Mexico, but too many came back uneaten, so they stopped. Even now, they’ve had some customers order tacos and only eat the filling, leaving the homemade tortillas on the plate.
“It’s the equivalent of you finding an organic wheat from Italy, getting it, bringing it to your restaurant, milling it in-house, and then producing your product with it. What would the up-charge be on that?” says Truitt, who opened Casa Pública in June 2017. “You’re putting up a product that by weight or by cost you’re using the same level of product, or even a higher level of product, but on the Mexican side you have to charge 50 percent less. ... We could charge more; we just wouldn’t sell any. The response could be that, ‘Oh, I can go to Mexico and get it for $2.’ Of course you can. The economy is much different.”
Many New York restaurants that advertise handmade corn tortillas use nixtamalized corn flour, which reconstitutes with water and doesn’t require space for a mill. When compared to freshly ground nixtamal, like at Cosme and Rosie’s, the flavor of these tortillas is not as good. In Mexico, eating them has also become somewhat politically charged, with many Mexicans believing that the corn-flour industry has helped push along the extinction of diverse, landrace strains of Mexican corn. Others argue that Gruma — owner of Maseca, the leading brand of nixtamalized corn flour — was incentivized by the Mexican government to lure Mexican customers into eating more convenient tortillas, at a cost of Mexican culinary heritage and traditions.
At this point, though, most New York customers are unaware of any corn tortilla politics. They just seem happy with something that doesn’t taste like it came out of a bag. Ronny Jaramillo, co-owner of Varrio 408 and Chela in Park Slope, says customers love the corn tortillas at Varrio 408, a taquería with a fast-casual vibe.
Claudia Guzmán, of Izúcar de Matamoros, Puebla, makes the masa daily using the nixtamalized flour, and once it’s ready, she does not bother weighing it or rolling it into balls first. (The tortillas still turn out identical.) Guzmán estimates that she makes about 700 to 1,000 tortillas in a busy day, which are used in the restaurant’s tacos and also sold by the pound. Prior to this job, she cleaned houses in Brooklyn, and she says she prefers this work.
“Despite being so far away, I can continue with my tradition,” she says.
Lesley Téllez is a writer in New York City and the author of Eat Mexico: Recipes from Mexico City’s Streets, Markets and Fondas.