Comment by teslabox | Hacker News Reader

Comment by teslabox | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Many stores have Bob's Red Mill Organic Masa. A friend was visiting, I was trying to get her to give up on her no-carbohydrate ambitions. She scarfed down her flour tortillas that were included with the meat she'd purchased earlier. Then she tried my lumpy home-made corn tortilla: "that's delicious".

Corn (and other seeds) have a lot of anti-nutrients - this is one reason people have gravitated to refined grains. The anti-nutrients are deactivated when the seed is boiled in an alkali - the process is called Nixtamalization [0]. Native Americans boiled their corn in wood ash. Lime [1] is now used for this purpose.

It's said the European explorers took Corn back to Europe, but didn't realize the wisdom of boiling corn in wood ash. Corn has a good amount of Vitamin B-3, but eating a diet of non-nixtamalized corn causes Pellegra [2] (Vitamin B-3 deficiency), due to the niacin not being available on account of it being locked up in the starch. (I think the Slate Star Codex blog talked about this phenomenon. Similarly, Cassava (yuca) root was taken from South America to Africa, but they didn't share how important it is to remove the cyanide in the outer shell and stem in the center...)

Making your own tortillas is very easy. I follow the directions on Bob's Masa [4] package: corn, salt, water, wait, spoon onto plastic wrap, fold plastic wrap, crush into tortilla-like shape, apply to hot plate.

I have ambition to use the lime I purchased at the mexican grocer to make my own masa, but I haven't gotten past watching videos on Youtube. I need some corn... Maybe I should grow corn this summer. I might have enough time to get some seeds in the ground. :)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixtamalization

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lime_(material)

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pellagra#Epidemiology

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassava#Potential_toxicity

[4] https://www.bobsredmill.com/organic-golden-masa-harina-flour...

> Making your own tortillas is very easy.

True, once you've learned: how wet to make the dough, how small to make the dough balls, how thin to press the dough balls, how to peel the plastic from the pressed tortilla, how to release the pressed tortilla from your hand onto the hot pan, how long to leave the tortilla so that they'll inflate like balloons when flipped, … in other words, there's a knack to it.

(And people who make tortillas balloon so reliably — that they can slice them open, and pour an egg inside to cook — have developed true mastery.)

Also, making your own tortillas is very time consuming.

A tip that may or may not help:

I don't make tortillas, but I do make pitas, which have a similar ballooning thing. The best way I've found to get them to puff is to preheat the broiler and a cast-iron pan, then put the dough disk on the pan and the pan under the broiler.

Cooking it from both sides like once at that gives me spectacular puffs every time. I'm not sure why I can't get that from the stove top -- overcooking? undercooking? too high a temperature? -- but this setup works great for me.

(On my stove, with my pans, under my broiler. This all seems to have so many variables that maybe any advice other than "practice on what works for you" is useless.)

Or because it's your own kitchen and not a Michelin star restaurant you can just mess up literally every step of the process and still get something delicious. You act like you have to study the press for years before attempting to make your first tortilla not supervised by your grandma.

Perhaps you don't cook for other people.

Or because it's your own kitchen and not a Michelin star restaurant you can just mess up literally every step of the process, still get something delicious, and people's reactions will be "wow you made these? They're so good."

Whatever makes you happy.

> Bob's Red Mill Organic Masa

Note - that's Masa Harina, not masa. Masa marina is dried corn flour, freshly ground masa hasn't been dried.

Masa can also be masa harina that has been rehydrated so the distinction is minimal these days.

>I was trying to get her to give up on her no-carbohydrate ambitions

..but why?

It's already very hard to follow a low-carb diet.

She was trapped with hunger cravings, and would try to satiate herself with sugar-free (stevia/etc) junk foods.

At one point she came up to me with my haagen daz ice cream container and asked, "why does my brain work, when I eat haagen daz?" I told her about how the brain runs on glucose AND fructose, that she was starving her brain of glucose, and that when a brain doesn't have any fructose it transforms some of the glucose into fructose, and that trying to go no-carbohydrate is very inefficient.

Eventually I think she decided it'd be okay to eat fruit.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com