How to make great tortillas in Hong Kong, whether or not you have a tortilla press and special cornflour
Susan Jung returns from the United States with a tortilla press and a bag of masa harina cornflour
Tortillas - at least the type made from ground cornmeal - are probably the easiest, fastest type of "bread" you can make. They're made of masa harina, which is often called cornflour, although it is a specific type. It's not the kind of cornflour used to thicken sauces, nor is it just a finer grind of the dried corn that's used to make polenta or cornbread.
Masa harina is made of dried corn soaked in slaked lime, also known as cal or calcium hydroxide. When it's consumed on its own, corn isn't very nutritious, because our bodies have a hard time digesting it. The Aztecs somehow figured out that soaking dried corn in water that contained wood ash made it easier to digest, and therefore it was much more nutritious. The term used for the process of treating the kernels with lime is "nixtamalisation".
The best corn tortillas (and other nixtamal ground-corn products) are made from kernels that are freshly ground into a slightly coarse dough that has to be used within a day, as it's highly perishable and the texture changes when it's refrigerated. The best texture is achieved by hand-patting this dough into thin circles.
Fresh masa is only available in places where there is a large Mexican community (which unfortunately rules out Hong Kong) and hand-patting the dough into circles thin enough to be called a tortilla is much harder than it looks (trust me, I've tried). So that means we have to rely on commercially ground cornflour and a tortilla press (or a very heavy pan and a lot of elbow-grease).
Accompanying my tortilla press was a 2kg bag of Maseca - the brand of masa harina sold in most supermarkets in southern California. I compared it to the Bob's Red Mill brand version from City'super: they were very different.
