Tortillas Yucatecas Hechas a Mano

This is a tortilla from Yucatan. Not from central Mexico, not from Oaxaca, not the thick gordita-style discs of the north. The Yucatecan tortilla is thin, almost translucent at the edges, pressed small, and made from the corn that grows on the Peninsula: Nal-Tel, the yellow landrace, or Dzit-Bacal, the white one. These are not the hybrid corns of industrial Mexico. They are the corns the Maya have been planting in milpas since long before any Spanish ship dropped anchor in Campeche.

The technique is nixtamalization and it is older than every recipe you will ever cook. Dried corn is simmered with cal, calcium hydroxide, then rested overnight, rinsed, and ground into masa. Cal does two things. It loosens the pericarp so the kernel can be ground smooth. And it unlocks the niacin in the corn so the people who eat it do not get pellagra. The pre-Columbian Maya figured this out without a chemistry book. The senoras in the Yucatecan villages still do it without one. Maseca is a shortcut and it tastes like one. If you want a Yucatecan tortilla, you start with nixtamal. No me vengas con atajos.

My mother was from Jalisco and her tortillas were a little thicker, a little browner. The first time I ate a real Yucatecan tortilla was in Mani, the small town near Izamal, in a kitchen with a clay comal set over a wood fire and a woman pressing tortillas one at a time with the heel of her hand. They were so thin you could see the light through them. She wrapped a stack in a hand-embroidered servilleta and set them in a small basket woven from huano palm. That is the tortilla you are making. Cada estado, su propia cocina.