Making Tortillas The 3,000-Year-Old-Fashioned Way | Beyond the Menu

You might THINK that corn tortilla from your favorite Mexican restaurant is as good as it gets, but chances are it’s made from a mass-produced corn powder. But fear not - a better corn tortilla exists and has existed for thousand of years. All you need is fresh corn and an ancient science that’s almost as old as civilization itself.

Support for this program comes from Krishnan Shah Family Foundation and supporters of the KQED Studios Fund

Thanks to Emmanuel Galvan, owner of Bolita Masa, for unlocking the magic of corn tortillas.

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📖 Chapters:
0:00 Is your favorite corn tortilla made from a powder?
1:02 Emmanuel Galvan shows off his fresh masa
1:38 Why grocery store tortillas don't taste right
1:58 Masa is the backbone of Mexican cuisine
2:32 Corn used to be a grass called teosinte
3:02 Nixtamalization: the ancient science to unlock the corn tortilla
4:11 How corn became a staple crop for Mesoamericans
5:59 Grinding the corn into masa
7:04 How Maseca became popular
8:57 Tasting corn tortillas
9:30 Tasting tatelas

Read More:
Masa by Jorge Gaviria
https://masienda.com/products/masa-book

What is nixtamal?
https://www.epicurious.com/ingredient...

How corn became corn
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.11...

How the corn tortilla went corporate
https://grist.org/technology/masa/

The masters of masa
https://www.texasmonthly.com/food/mas...

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About Beyond The Menu:
The story of the food on your plate is more than just the recipe. Each ingredient and every cooking technique goes back hundreds if not thousands of years, traversing the globe on a wildly delicious cross-cultural adventure. In KQED’s new digital food series Beyond The Menu, host Cecilia Phillips interviews chefs, authors, and other experts to dig up surprising facts on the cultural pathways of today’s popular dishes. It’s a history show, it’s a mystery series, it’s a celebration of multicultural cuisine, sometimes it’s even a science program, all set against the backdrop of mouth-watering food cinematography.

Beyond the Menu is produced by KQED, check out all episodes here: https://www.kqed.org/beyondthemenu