Tortilla Making Failure by Ruth Paget
I could honestly say I had no culture shock when adjusting to life in Stuttgart (Germany) when I lived there except for on major drawback – no Mexican food.
For a Californian, this is severe homeopathic withdrawal. I rely on Vitamin-C rich chile peppers, tomatoes, cilantro, and lime juice and sulfa-compounds in onions found in pico de gallo salsa to boost my immune system.
Germany’s polar vortex winters convinced me to try making my own Mexican food. German bookstores do not carry English-language cookbooks. (They do have some tech ones I noticed on C+++ for designing apps.)
I had a kindle and purchased Everyday Mexican by Rick Bayless to try and make an authentic Mexican meal at in Germany. German stores and the commissary on base did not sell tortillas. I turned to Amazon to order masa harina and a manual tortilla press.
I waited for these items to be delivered and reread the tortilla recipe many times. Finally, Laurent brought them home and said the mailroom people said, “You cannot live without those items in Germany.”
Masa harina is a corn meal that has been nixtamalized, soaked with calcium hydroxide and water and then rinsed. Nixtamalized corn becomes sticky so a corn tortilla can hold together with the addition of water before cooking without the addition of lard. (Flour tortillas use lard to hold together.)
Using the directions Everyday Mexican, I patted out little balls of masa harina to press. I put plastic wrap on the bottom of the press and placed the dough on top. I put another piece of plastic wrap on top of that and pressed down. The ball went squish and stuck to the plastic wrap on both sides. I had obviously put too much water in the masa harina. On the next press, I dusted the bottom plastic wrap with masa harina and the top of the dough ball. That worked better.
The tortillas were about ¼-inch thick, but I griddled them anyways. That is thick by tortilla standards, but I thought they looked sweet. I put them in a tortilla warmer that I had brought from California and prepared the taco toppings.
I made my own seasoning for the meat with cayenne pepper and dry garlic from Gilroy, California. I grated allgäu emmentaler cheese (a local adaptation), shredded cabbage (a local adaptation with Vitamin C I found out), chopped tomatoes, chopped a mild green pepper, and put a spoon in the mild salsa I found in the snacks aisle at the commissary.
The first thing Laurent said about the tortillas was, “These are thick. Are they cooked through?” I said I had tasted them and that they were good.
Thanks to Rick Bayless, I knew that tortillas were versatile and had different names depending on shape and function, which I explained to Laurent as follows:
“So, this chubby tortilla made into a taco is a gordita. If you keep the tortilla flat and put items on top of it, you have a tostada. If the tortilla is made into a boat shape with raised edges, it becomes a sope. If the tortilla is stuffed with beans and griddled, it becomes a panucho.”
I would like to be a purist who always wants authentic food, but I learned to like the German tacos I made. The commissary finally sold Old El Paso hard corn tortillas, which I used, but I am glad I tried to make corn tortillas at home with Everyday Mexican by Rick Bayless.
By Ruth Paget, author Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France
