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Tortillas Comitecas con Asiento
Created by Chef Lupita
Comitán's highland Chiapas tortilla, hand-pressed from fresh nixtamal masa and finished hot with asiento, the dark pork-lard sediment that melts into corn and makes weeknight food serious.
Chiapas, in the Meseta Comiteca around Comitán de Domínguez, is where this tortilla belongs. The town sits near the Guatemalan border, in highland corn country, with Tojolabal villages close enough that market days carry more knowledge than most cookbooks. This is not a northern flour tortilla. It is fresh nixtamal masa, a comal, and asiento.
Asiento is the dark, fragrant sediment at the bottom of rendered manteca de cerdo. Not clean white lard. Not bacon grease. Asiento. The little browned pork particles and corn-colored fat carry more flavor than a pile of toppings. In Comitán, I watched women keep it in a small clay cazuelita at the side of the comal, spooning it onto tortillas while the surface was still open and hot.
The trick is restraint: enough asiento to perfume the tortilla, not so much that you lose the corn. The tortilla should puff, freckle, and stay tender. Fold it, tuck it into a servilleta, eat it with black beans or a spoonful of chile simojovel salsa if the table wants heat. Cada estado, su propia cocina. This one is Chiapas.
Ingredients
pork back fat or pork fat trimmings with a little meat attached
Quantity
1 pound, or 1/2 cup prepared asiento
cut into 1-inch pieces if rendering
water
Quantity
1/4 cup
for rendering
fine sea salt
Quantity
1 teaspoon, divided
| Ingredient | Quantity |
|---|---|
| pork back fat or pork fat trimmings with a little meat attachedcut into 1-inch pieces if rendering | 1 pound, or 1/2 cup prepared asiento |
| waterfor rendering | 1/4 cup |
| fine sea salt | 1 teaspoon, divided |
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