Clayudas: Making Oaxaca's Super-Sized Tortillas
"The heart of Mexican cooking burns with ancient fires," says Rick Bayless, the Mexican cooking authority and Chicago restaurateur. In traditional Mexican kitchens, fire interacts daily with corn—the country's foundation food—to produce the tortillas at the core of every meal.
Mexico's staple grain is not the sweet corn we eat off the cob but starchy field corn that is dried for long keeping. To reconstitute it, Mexican cooks long ago learned to soak the corn in an alkaline bath—with wood ashes in times past, with calcium hydroxide (slaked lime) today. This bath softens the hull, making it easier to remove, so the corn is more digestible and will yield a smooth dough. What's more, the alkaline treatment greatly improves the grain's nutritional value by making the bound niacin available to our bodies. If the ancients had not learned this secret, they could never have built a civilization on corn.
At the age of seven, Abigail Mendoza Ruiz learned how to pat corn tortillas by hand. Later she mastered the laborious process of soaking and grinding the corn on a metate, or flat basalt mortar, to make masa, the dough for tortillas. Today, her restaurant Tlamanalli, in Teotitlán del Valle, near Oaxaca City, is a food lover's Mecca.
Traditional Oaxacan cooks make two types of corn tortillas: small ones for everyday, and much larger ones, called clayudas, cooked on a clay griddle over an open fire. Bayless says late-night street stalls in Oaxaca sell clayudas cooked directly on the coals, then spread with pork cracklings and cheese.
In this video clip, you can watch Ruiz grinding the soaked, cooked corn on the metate. Her sure, rhythmic motions reveal that she has done this task thousands of times.
"You know that something that looks so simple is extremely hard," says Bayless, who has led many Culinary Institute of America tours to Mendoza's restaurant. "It takes real skill and tremendous strength. I've seen many a guy try to do this on our trips to Mexico and cry uncle."
Using a wooden press, Mendoza will stretch the dough into a giant circle. Watch her drape the sticky round over her arm and then deftly lay it on the griddle. By checking the edges, she knows just when to flip it. Deceptively simple, her beautiful clayudas are a triumph of Mexican culinary art.