Worst cookbook mistake ever?
Enrique Olvera's 'Sunny Days, Taco Nights' badly botches the most basic and important component of the dish: the tortilla. Plus: Vegans are people, too.
Half a year ago, I was super excited to read that this summer, Enrique Olvera — Mexico’s most famous chef — would be publishing a new book: Sunny Days, Taco Nights.
Olvera’s last effort, Tu Casa Mi Casa, is one of my favorite cookbooks. Now the brilliant chef (Pujol in Mexico City, Cosme and Atla in New York, etc.) would be sharing his recipes for tacos, one of my favorite foods in the universe. Such great news!
At long last, my review copy from Phaidon arrived (it will be published June 3). I couldn’t wait to crack it open. How, I wondered, would Olvera instruct us to make tortillas? Tu Casa Mi Casa, you see, was published in 2019, just a few months before Masienda introduced its groundbreaking, life-changing heirloom-corn masa harina onto the market. Before that, anyone wanting to enjoy handmade tortillas had to make and grind nixtamal, a tedious and difficult process for home cooks, or use awful commodity-corn masa harina such as Maseca. Ick.
I started flipping through Sunny Days’ 100 recipes for taco fillings. How odd, I thought, that there’s no introductory section whatsoever on how to make tortillas. Instead, each of the recipes that calls for corn tortillas — which is to say most of them — sends us to a recipe on page 200. There we go. Corn Tortillas. Prep time: 15 minutes. Cooking time: 5 minutes. Makes: 30. So far so good.
Next, the ingredients, beginning with 2 pounds, 4 ounces / 1 kilo — whaaaa??? — cornmeal!
You read that right. Cornmeal. Not masa harina, cornmeal.
Anyone who has ever made a corn tortilla knows that it is impossible to make one from cornmeal. Corn kernels require, in order to become masa (tortilla dough), nixtamalization, or cooking with culinary lime, to soften the pericarp surrounding each one. Only then can you grind them into a dough that will hold together. The discovery of that was the genius of Mesoamerican indigenous peoples.
If you mix regular cornmeal with warm water and knead that together, as Olvera’s new cookbook suggests, you cannot possibly get a dough. Instead you get a pile of something that looks and feels like wet sand.
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