Tortillas Blandas Oaxaqueñas

This is a Oaxacan tortilla. Not a Mexico City tortilla, not a Sonoran flour tortilla, not the small thin disc that gets rolled around carnitas at a taquería in the Roma. The Oaxacan tortilla blanda is six to seven inches across, slightly thicker than its central Mexican cousin, and made to hold a piece of tasajo, a spoonful of black bean paste, a smear of chile pasilla mixe. It is the bread of the Valles Centrales, eaten with every meal, and it tastes like the corn it came from.

The corn is the dish. In Oaxaca the masa is ground from maíz criollo, heirloom corn varieties grown by small farmers in the milpas of the Sierra Norte, the Valles Centrales, and the Mixteca. White corn, yellow corn, the small round bolita corn of Tlacolula. Each one tastes different. Each one belongs to a place. If your tortilla starts with industrial masa harina from yellow dent corn, you have a tortilla. You do not have a Oaxacan tortilla. La diferencia es el maíz.

My mother was from Jalisco and pressed her tortillas small. The first time I sat at a table in Mitla and a senora handed me a tortilla blanda the size of my open hand, still warm, faintly speckled from the clay comal, I understood that I had been eating one tortilla and Oaxaca had been eating another. I have been chasing the right Oaxacan press ever since. Cada estado, su propia cocina, and the tortilla is the place where the kitchen begins.

No me vengas con atajos here. The masa needs the right hydration, the comal needs real heat, and the tortilla needs three turns to puff. Skip any of those and the tortilla will tell on you.