Nice piece in today's Free Press:

Southwest Detroit is the place to be for fresh-from-the-oven tortillas

BY SUSAN M. SELASKY • FREE PRESS TEST KITCHEN DIRECTOR • April 30, 2009



Making corn tortillas, considered the bread of Mexico, seems fairly simple. All you need is masa harina, water, salt and a tortilla press to make the dough as thin as what you find in stores.

But in anticipation of Cinco de Mayo [[the 5th of May), which commemorates Mexico's victory over the French in the 1862 battle of Puebla, why not leave it to the experts?

Lucky for us, we have three tortilla factories in our own backyard. Just flip over a package of corn or flour tortillas and you might see it's from one of southwest

Detroit's Big 3: Hacienda Foods, La Jalisciense Tortilla Factory and La Michoacana Tortilla Bakery. Or visit one of Mexicantown's grocers for freshly made tortillas. Go early and the packaged tortillas will still be warm.

About 70,000 corn tortillas run through just one line at Lydia Gutierrez's Hacienda Foods on an average day. On a recent visit, machines were humming along, producing corn tortillas, regular corn chips and blue corn chips.

"For us in Mexicantown, we will sell more corn than flour tortillas," says Gutierrez, who started the business in 1994 with her late husband Richard. "Outside the area, they sell more flour tortillas. In a lot of cases, flour tortillas replace bread."

It's the corn tortillas, not flour tortillas, Gutierrez says, that are used most often at the Hispanic table.

To make the corn tortillas, corn -- which Gutierrez gets mainly from Ohio -- is cleaned and soaked in lime for hours. It then goes into a machine where it is ground using two specially made round grooved stones that look like the wheels on Fred Flintstone's car.

Once ground, it becomes masa, which is similar to soft dough. At Hacienda Foods, the masa dough is fed through machines that press it and cut it into round tortillas or triangular chips. The tortillas and chips are baked and the chips are fried and seasoned.

Once you have corn tortillas, they can be used as soft tacos, fried for tostada or taco shells, or cut into chips.

Contact SUSAN M. SELASKY: 313-222-6432 or sselasky@freepress.com.


http://www.freep.com/article/2009043...ES02/904300621