A huge welcome to Steve's kitchen, this is going to be a wordy one, a lengthy one
trust me, I'm so passionate about masa and the nixtamalization process. It's
going to come across, so if you're not into this you may not enjoy it and if
you're fascinated as I am you are going to enjoy it because basically masa is
that cornerstone, it's the quintessential ingredient in Mexican cooking. I think
Masa and Mole are probably the two things that make Mexican food so very
unique and I think most of my Mexican friends would agree with this, I mean you
don't have your tamales, atole, you don't have that without masa.
In fact tamales comes from the word nixtamalization, so I'm going to be showing
you how to take your corn and Nixtamalize it. Now forgive me for taking
so long, we have tested and tested the process of making nixtamalized corn and it's been difficult finding some of the ingredients
so I'll give you some tips on that a little bit later on.
It's also been complicated working out how to grind the corn down to a perfect
masa. We have tried blenders, we've tried on a
grain mill that I have that didn't really work, we've done it through the
meat grinder on the finest settings, that didn't work. Eventually we found that, I
also tried a mortar and pestle well that was just too long-winded and
complicated. Eventually we found a good food processor will give you pretty good
masa, it puts a lot of stress so you do need a very good food processor. I
haven't got one with me when I was traveling. So what I decided to do was to
order this absolute beauty from the USA. This is a corn mill, they're made by Corona
or Victoria. Most of the older Mexican families will know these, they had them
in the house and this is perfect for making masa. I'll do an unboxing of this
later on, unfortunately the box came pretty battered and there was a few
little bits that were damaged inside which is a bit of a shame but it's still
very functional and it's a beautiful machine and it makes really, really good
masa. Yes it's a little bit long winded but it produces great masa and
I don't think actually the process of making it is that difficult, if you're
doing it daily or weekly, it's a lot of fun and Masa does freeze by the way, so
if you make it in in bulk, you can always take your beautiful fresh masa and
store it. The next complicated thing is that I couldn't get the white corn
that's often used for masa in Mexico but they do use the yellow corn as well and
this is just a simple yellow corn and I found this tastes really delicious. So
contrary to what a lot of people told me you can't use it, doesn't work as well as
the white corn, this yellow corn does and this is just a sort of corn they use for
farm feed and things like that, make sure it's food grade suitable for eating.
You're going to need this corn, it's the only real ingredients apart from water
and another product that's quite difficult to get, which is calcium
hydroxide, often known as pickling lime. You can buy this on Amazon, I'll put a
link down below. It's called pickling lime, it's used for making pickles.
Calcium hydroxide is highly alkaline, it's a little bit caustic so you do have
to be careful, don't go breathing this stuff in but we're going to be using
this to nixtamalize our corn. What is nixtamalization? Well it's a process
where a highly alkaline liquid solution basically changes the structure of the
corn to make a lot more digestible. It brings out some of the natural enzymes
in the corn that makes it healthy. I told you this was going to be wordy.
The Europeans, originally when they started bringing corn in from South
America to Europe, some countries bought the corn in but they didn't bring in the
nixtamalization process and what that meant was as they became more
dependent on corn, they weren't getting the nutritious goodness and some
countries had some really.... periods of time when when the whole population
became very sick because without nixtamalizing your corn there's no
real nutritional value in corn, so really important step.
How it was discovered, we're not really sure, nobody fully understands whether
many years ago nixtamalization was discovered, if you if you actually take
wood ash from a fire and add it into water you get the same sort of process as
this, it will, it will give you a very high caustic content. So maybe it
happened by accident and you can still do that, actually a lot of people still
can use burnt wood or burnt seashells to get calcium hydroxide or or a similar
sort of product which will nixtamalize your corn. So you can see I'm
really fascinated by this and the process and I'll explain to you as we go
along. What I'm going to do today is, I'm going to take two cups of my yellow corn
and I'm going to explain to you how to nixtamalize this
and then we're going to make some of the most delicious masa and as I said there
are so many dishes that work with masa. We in the West tend to substitute corn
with wheat in many of the dishes and it really doesn't taste the same. Once you
nixtamalize corn it becomes really buttery, really delicious, you can smell it during the process. So let's get
on and make some nixtamalized corn.
Now I'm going to work with a couple of cups, that's about a pound, four hundred and
fifty grams, of my beautiful yellow corn. Now if you can get the blue or the white
corn go for it, it's all about experimenting with what you can get but
the yellow works just fine. I have a pan here, I've got about two cups of corn so
I'm going with six cups of water and I just put this corn into the water and
into the water I'm going to put about half a tablespoon of my pickling lime. Now be
a little careful with that pickling lime, it is a little bit caustic, so you don't
want to be breathing in the powder. I've got to take this over to the stove now
and we're going to bring this up to a boil I want you to watch how the corn color
changes as it heats up. Now I'm just dissolving the lime into the warming
water, what I wanted to show you is how the alkalinity of the water changes
greatly the color. I hope it shows here on the camera, it's gone to a really rich
buttery yellow and the smell coming off the corn is rich and buttery. I'm just
going to dip a piece of litmus paper into the alkaline water so we can take a
reading and you can see that it's coming in around about 12 to 13. So that's a
fairly high alkaline content in the water. Now when the water comes up to a
simmer like that I want us to continue to boil this for 10 minutes and then
we'll turn the heat off. Now many of you might find this interesting, I know I did.
I'm just going to take a control sample 1/4 cup of corn and I'm just going to
add some water in the pan and bring it to a boil. Now you will notice that the
color doesn't change anywhere near as much as it does in the alkaline water
and you'll have to take my word for it, there isn't that rich buttery smell
coming off the corn either. Now we can just do a litmus paper test, if we dip
that into the water, as you would expect it's coming up at 7, which is neutral. Now
you don't need to boil that for any longer than 10 minutes, when it's
completed I'm just going to pop a lid on. So now we needed some patience we're
going to leave this for at least 8 hours overnight, it can go a little bit longer,
12-14 hours is perfectly fine and then we can start to process this corn into a
perfectly beautiful masa. So the following morning the lime has continued
to affect the corn. You can see it's still this lovely rich
buttery color, don't be tempted to put your hands into the lime water, it's
pretty caustic, it can burn a little bit. Now I've added a lot of water into the
pot and now you can get your hands in there and we just want to rinse this
through, until we've got rid of all of the lime .What you need to do is rub the
corn together and you'll see the outer skins of the corn are starting to come off.
So just continue to rub the corn together, the skins will float in the
water and then we can just pour them away. Now you want to continue to do this
until most the skins are gone, you don't have to be particularly picky about this,
we haven't got to get rid of a hundred percent. Now with the corn rinsed and
most of the skins removed we've got this beautiful clean and fresh corn and it's
no longer in an alkaline solution, so it's quite safe to handle. Now if you
look at a piece of corn that's been actually soaking overnight you can
actually put your nail into it and break it open.
It's almost soft enough to break just under the pressure of your fingers. So
now it's time for us to get and make masa. Now I've set up my grain mill, as
I said before it does actually work really well in the food processor, you
need to have a fairly strong food processor. This mill here will actually
clamp onto a table or a work counter, it's got a little silicon pad to protect
it. Once we place the hopper on the top, we're going to start to pour the corn in
and crank the handle. Now I've set the mill wheel to its tightest setting, so
I'll get a very fine masa on the first pass. You really don't want to be
putting the masa through a second time. It's ideal if you get the perfect
consistency in one pass. Now ordinarily you'd have the guard on here, that would
stop the masa that's coming out through the top from just falling all
over the place. I'm going to leave the guard cover off so we can see what's
going on and you can feel straightaway that's already turning into a beautiful
masa dough. You want to make sure it's going through fine enough that you can
use this as a dough. It's a little bit dry so I'm going to add a splash of
water in here now. I think what I love about this particular grinder is
it doesn't take that long to go through this whole pound of corn.
So it's not that complicated, not that difficult and if your arms get
tired, you can always change hands. Now sometimes I'll just use a wooden spoon
to encourage the corn down into the hopper. So very quickly we've ended up
with all this beautiful masa. Now if it feels just a little bit dry, you can add
a splash of water, don't add too much, you'd be surprised how quickly it gets
too wet but what we're looking for is this gorgeous soft and very smooth masa.
Now I think it's quite interesting to note that we now have seven hundred and
sixty grams, that's about one point six pounds of masa from about 450 grams,
that is one pound of grain. So the moisture that's absorbed during the
cooking process and the grinding process gives us quite a bit more dough than we
started with. Over the next few episodes of Steve's
kitchen we're going to be putting this masa to some really fascinating use.
Even some things that maybe my Mexican friends will not have realized you can
do with this delicious rich and buttery masa dough. So I hope you're going to
join me for that because like I say masa is basically the foundation of Mexican
cooking and if you've not had it before it's worth the effort, trust me. It isn't a
lot of work to make homemade fresh masa and the payoffs, well they're tenfold. So
with that said, we've made our fresh masa and I'll see you very shortly for
another episode of Steve's kitchen. Be good, see you then.