Understand The Rules Before You Break The Rules

Photo by Jayson Roy on Unsplash; Edited by the author.

I am a connoisseur of Mexican and Central American cuisine and have eaten a fair share of tortillas in my life. The problem is, most of the tortillas available in America are flour-based and virtually tasteless.

Flour-based tortillas were an invention of Europeans who colonized North and South America. These conquerors were afraid of corn and brought wheat from across the ocean; they ruined tortillas forever. Proper tortillas are corn-based, full of texture, and delicious.

Corn tortillas are the staple throughout Mexico and Central America, where corn is the crop of choice. Here in America, corn is grown for fuel and sweeteners, not consumption. However, wheat is the States’ crop, so we’re stuck with these bland, bleached, bogus knock-offs.

There’s a tortillaria around the corner from our house that sells a stack of handmade corn tortillas for a few dollars. They are much better than the flour-based frisbees available in every grocery store. Still, these tortillas don’t hold a candle to the ones made in rural Guatemala.

You can’t travel very far in Guatemala without seeing women in traditional Mayan dress standing next to an open-flame stove patting out tortillas. Each pat within the palm flattens the cornmeal into place and brings out the yellow puck’s flavor. But that’s the final step…