How Tortillas Lost Their Magic
How Tortillas Lost Their Magic
Most American tortillas taste like cardboard. Chefs, restaurants, and companies are trying to restore the corny glory.
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They have a good point. I did research into cornbread for a project and it's suffered from the same issue as tortillas. Most cornmeal that you buy in the store nowadays tastes like sawdust and has to be enriched with a bunch of stuff to make it preserve longer. Originally southern-style cornbread had zero added sugar in it, but most recipes nowadays call for a tablespoon of sugar to balance out the flavor of the sawdust cornmeal so it ends up just tasting like nothing. You don't do that if you use good, heirloom corn, and it actually has flavor.
It ultimately comes down to the quality of the corn and the method that they use to process it and to maximize profits. Stone ground cornmeal yields a better product, but is less efficient.
I'm going to be honest here, I'm highly skeptical of the quality of cornmeal leading to lower quality tortillas. This is mainly because we already know why they are bad in the states. Not to mention the comment iteself is written like it was a conclusion made in conjecture.
Please cite the study you read/wrote that concludes cornmeal is the reason behind why corn tortillas are so bad in the us and that the deterioration of cornmeal is what led to it.
The quality of any ingredients has a huge effect on the intensity of flavors. Check out the differences in free range/ field chicken eggs vs indoor/caged/ feed eggs
I don't need to check out the differences in other foods because that isn't relevant to this discussion. It may be relevant but then you would need to provide evidence of that connection, when it would be probably easier to cite the original source they spoke of, instead of having to provide two different sets of data.
I'm also curious how the degradation of cornmeal even happened, which I'm sure this study would touch on.
There are a few heirloom plants that bear fruit with more intense flavor than industrial crops, which is a pretty well known fact if you are into food as a business/ home cook/ attend farmers market etc
Tomatoes here https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-heirloom-tomatoes-taste-so-good/
Farmer brags about corn http://masienda.com/blogs/learn/about-heirloom-corn#%3A~%3Atext=In+this+case%2C+heirloom+corn%2Con+to+the+next+generation.
Mentions of the distinct taste https://www.reddit.com/r/farming/comments/15a83zu/why_the_nostalgic_flavor_of_this_heirloom_corn_is/
https://tinybutmightyfoods.com/why-heirloom/
Like this is common knowledge, it's specifically selected for flavor and grown in different ways. Not sure why you think one plant is going to be the same as another variety of the plant.