Hello and welcome to Cooking Goose. This is Dave Marlon, host of Cooking Choose coming to you live from the heart of Manhattan at Rockefeller Center. Joined uh New Stand Studios, joined as usual with Nastasia the Hammer Lopez. How are you doing, Stu? Good.
You good? Mm-hmm. Yeah. You got Joe Hazenrock in the panels. Joe, what's up?
Hey, how are you doing, man? Great to see you. I'm doing all right. We don't have uh John's not here today, and our West Coast crew, because we're taping at a special time. So if you happen to be listening live on the Patreon, you can call your questions in to 917-410-1507.
That's 917-4101507. And I'm assuming a lot of our listeners are gonna have good questions. Maybe they're not here to listen, you know, dial in right now, but uh we got some good questions for our main, our only guest today, right, Stas. By the way, I feel really bad. I was late.
This is like old school me. This is like Roberta's era me coming in late because we changed the time. Joe, you kind of slapped the lateness out of me somewhat. It used to be I would always show up at 1210 for a 12 o'clock show. Yeah.
And uh I was told that that's uh poor form. Uh penalty, penalty by fine. Wow. Right. Damn.
Uh is that oh that's like the nanny. That's like the uh pay for pay for the nanny. Pay for the nanny.com. That's my next uh yo. I'm not gonna go into any stories because otherwise we'll go we'll go forever, but like, yeah, like child child care, paying extra for child care is a freaking nightmare.
And Nastasia has some great stories, but we're gonna either get to them at the very end or next week, right? Yeah. So that means that you and I aren't gonna be able to talk to each other for a week. We're gonna see each other tonight. I have to go, whatever.
We'll talk about that a little bit. The rock has a booze, apparently. Oh. Yes. I don't know what it is.
It's the top-selling booze, I think, like maybe of all time. It's like three in its first year was doing triple the sales that Casamigos did, like at its height. Wow. Wow. I don't work for him.
I'm just, you know. Well that was the that those were the uh Dulcet Tones. You have very good radio voice of I'm gonna try not to butcher your name. We had talked about it beforehand. Uh Jorge uh Gaviria, not Gaviera as I said before, uh Gaviria, uh who I met many many years ago the folks at Cosme were doing a uh um a demo at the Starchefs when it was at the uh over in the Hudson River.
Yeah. And uh they're doing a great that was the one where they were demoing I think that's the one where they put a uh a uh the Oja Santa leaf on the inside of the of the tortilla and flattened it down and cooked it real pretty. Oh yeah. Great demo. Uh Nastasia will remember that as the demo where uh I said I hope I get stabbed in the back.
Yeah. I want to stab myself in the back. It was the worst demo ever. That was the demo at Starchefs when the A V guy was so high that he was laying on his back No it's hung over. He was laying on his back staring at the ceiling instead of running the panels.
Yeah. Anyway uh so is the founder of Macienda and if you guys don't know it's the only real place to buy good corn like anywhere. Is that true you say? I mean I mean people sell some American corns but like if you want like uh if you want like do you also do Guatemala or just Mexican I can't remember. Just Mexico.
Yeah yeah which is like you know it's it's a lot still a lot of ground to cover oh yeah yeah yeah I'm not saying that you need to branch out, but I'm saying like there are good places to buy like uh uh American, old American style. Totally totally. We're I'd like to think we're sort of a we're a one-stop shop for Massa supplies like right as as high, you know, as high geek as you need to go, or is sort of like introductory. We kind of we meet you at whatever level you're at. So I mean you so you have it.
The reason you're here is you have a new book out. There's been you had a pamphlet for a number of years on on the nixtimal. Oh, but let's just do this. Let's just do this. Can we go back?
Let's go way back. Well, back in time or back in what we're talking about. Vast majority of the people listening to this show are down with nixtimalization so far. They are. But for people who aren't, let's just be completely inclusive and explain.
You explain, give me nixtimalization in a nutshell. Nixtimalization is an alchemy process that imbues corn, not the sweet kind, but like the field corn hard kind that doesn't really taste very much. It's kind of like inedible. It makes it nutritious, workable, elastic, uh, and um yeah, it just it becomes a superfood. So literally just the process of cooking corn in water that has a little bit of some kind of alkaline agent, calcium hydroxide, uh, and it renders it into like a workable, you know, form to grind into a a workable dough.
Right, right. So uh, you know, in the you know, for a long, long time, people in uh America and even in Mexico, frankly, right, who made tortillas, they were using a product called maseka. You want to describe yeah, like maseka is like the proprietary eponym of masa arena, right? So like band-aids are to bandages, jello is to I don't know, like red gelatin snack. Uh you know, maseka is the most uh well-known brand of masa arena, which is the dehydrated version of masa.
You know, masa is the finished product of corn that's been nixtimalized, ground, um, and then it's it's dehydrated. In maseka's case, it's greek dehydrated at a really, really high temperature. So it kind of just denatures the product. It's pretty flat flavor. Um, it's kind of like the Checo pasta, you know, like Love?
Okay, let's go back. In the book in the book, you liken it to bisquick, basically. Yeah, yeah. It's it's like Betty Crocker. It's the best.
Well, actually, it has a lot of uh has a lot of same problems. So like uh masa harina, you know, whatever, I always call it by the brand name, whatever, even though I actually don't buy Maseca brand, I don't think it's not what they carry in my store. Yeah. I have it in the house. I always have it in the house because it's it's simple.
It's it's you know, unlike making a biscuit or pancake where it's literally an extra 13 seconds to add the other stuff to it, right? You know, in the case of making uh real masa, you know, you know, nixtimalizing, you're talking about like 10, 12 hours sometimes. Yeah, yeah. It's there's a reason why this product was created. It disrupted the this sort of traditional, like incredibly labor-intensive process.
Right. So let's go, let's like our our people are very kind of like science-minded people. So let's let's yeah, let's let's get into it. So corn, as opposed to wheat, right? So you take wheat, you stick wheat in your mouth, kind, con, you you you grind it up in your mouth, you can break it.
It's hard. I wouldn't want to will mi mill wheat all day, but especially a lot of the older wheats are soft, right? And there are a lot of flowery corns, but corn is still rather difficult to grind, right? On its own. Uh also corn doesn't have gluten in it, right?
And there were no staples in um in the Mexico, Guatemala, or anywhere, you know, in in this these two continents. There was no uh staple that had uh gluten, right? They also didn't have barley, right? Uh they had corn. And uh they the grinding technology, uh, they never really were using this interesting.
When do you think, when did the rotary grinders come in for things like agave? Is that later or was that early? I mean, uh I'm not sure exactly the rotor grinders. I mean, I know that the whole nature of grinding as it relates to nickstamol was around the turn of the century, 20th century. So like early 1900s, the advent of electricity, and it really was quite a quite a phenomenon.
Right, but the animal-powered like giant stone rotary uh mills for like uh agave. Anyway, I don't think it's as ancient as like the matate mono. So matate mono. Yeah, I don't know. Yeah, like I I didn't bother looking it up, and I'm that's not the kind of thing that I study too much.
But nixalization, you go back thousands of years and you have pictures uh, you know, sculptures of you know, women on their knees on the ground, leaning over the the matate, which is the grinding block, and with the mono, which is you know, hand, right? Boom, boom, boom, grinding. Incredibly difficult work. Oh my gosh. Incredibly difficult.
Would be impossible to do dry. Yeah, not pleasant. You could, but why? Right. Well, in other words, but like all of these amazing things that we love, chocolate, mole, right, uh, masa, right, are all built around this idea of taking something paste-like and over and over and over, grinding it until it's very fine texture.
Right. So you can't do that unless you do this process nixtimalization. Yeah, basically. So I mean, do you want to go into kind of the nitty, the like nitty-gritty what you do? You take you take raw corn and you take an alkali.
You want to describe the alkali that you use? Yeah, I mean, calcium hydroxide is the most readily available. It's derived from calcium oxide. Um, this isn't gonna nail the science right now. Just wait.
Uh calcium oxide, which then comes from uh limestone, it's calcified limestone. So you could use that, you could use ash. Um I know that did you ever experiment with ash? Yeah, we talked about it maybe 10 years, like right when you were starting. And I started, I had a house in Connecticut at the time, and I started saving uh I started saving my ashes in a bucket.
And then uh, but I never I never it never tasted right to me. Did you ever get a good result? You said that people were getting really, really good results. I don't know whether I was using the wrong wood or I was just being impatient. I don't know.
I never boiled it, and maybe that's what you need to do. You definitely need to boil it. Yeah, it's it has like a nice campfire quality to it. You know, yeah, it was it's lovely. I I'd I would do it again.
Give it a shot. I'll try all the I mean I don't have a source of wood ashes anymore. I gotta get someone to send some to me. But the, you know, I mean, I do know from you know from later research that, you know, up these parts when people were taking corn and making like whole soup and stuff like that, it was all it was all ashes. And I'm assuming that the thing I always wondered, maybe you've done some research is that a cow, which is what you know I think is universally used.
Yeah. Cal is calcium hydroxide, right? Uh right. But like to make it from shells, you need to heat it to an like astronomical temperature. I tried.
I couldn't, I wasn't able to do it in my house even with a blowtorch, right? Because I need like a kiln situation. But I I gathered, I think from reading your book, I don't think it was something else, that there there are natural deposits of it in Mexico. Is that true? Yeah, I mean, definitely.
I mean, uh all sorts of shells were used in muscle shells, you know, all throughout and all throughout North America as well. I mean, this isn't just limited to Mexico. Mesoamerica covered, you know, modern day Central America and you know, parts of North America. I think what's interesting is the uh, you know, uh, even what's it called? Tequesquite.
I don't know if you've ever used that. I've tried I I never had someone next to me who was like, this is what you're doing. You know what I mean? So like I bought some. Hopefully the book will catch you there.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. But uh so I I had I I bought it, and then I was like, Yeah, it's it's more it's used more now as sort of like a flavoring agent, but you can actually nix the corn with it. But I I actually remember you had the only deep dive I could find on the internet, which is saying something. Uh I mean this is granted, it was like 10 years ago, but like more.
You did it, you did a deep dive on Ximization where I think you did rye, uh among other things. And I and I wanna say you put calcium hydroxide in your mouth to taste it and burn it. Live lie by mistake. I I ate so when we were packing up the French Culinary Institute. So that like so my I think the Nix and Mall post was right after Nastasi came on board, right, Doz?
Uh no, it was a couple months after I came on. I mean that's compared to our relationship now, that's right after. Happy 13 years. Thanks. He never acknowledged.
Yeah, please. Well, why would I acknowledge so much pain? Uh for both of us, not for me, both of us. Uh so the reason I think that Nastasia uh enjoyed uh working is because I was uh a cavalcade of idiocy. So I bought a uh what what what would you call that?
Like uh what's something that isn't meant to do anything? Like a fake, like a chotchke. What is that? Tchotchki. Tchotchki.
Remember I bought I went to like a souvenir shop in uh on 116th Street in like Lex, and I bought like a matate, yeah, like a show matate. Now like Fukezi? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly. There you go.
And it was like, it was like uh I'm holding my hands up, it was like a foot and something long. You know what I mean? And it was real rough, like mocojete rough, right? And I was like, what the and so I got it back to the French Culinary Institute. Remember this, Doz?
Mm-hmm. And I was like, this doesn't work, this sucks. And then so then I started grinding it with a grinder to kind of like try to like imitate that I've been using it for 30 years. Yeah. And then it's I still couldn't get it to work.
And then, Stas, you remember you duct taped it to my back? Yeah. What else did I take home that day? I t I you duct taped like a hundred pounds of shit stuff to my back. And he refuses to take taxis.
Oh what am I made of money? Yeah, I mean, we don't know each other that well. I never I never got it to work. And then I bought a corona. My god, do they suck?
And in fact, not the beer. Just beer's fine. I mean, it's great. If you know, if you if you you know want to drink seltzer, but instead you want beer, corona is uh, you know, wow. It's the seltzer of the South, you know.
You don't you disagree? I mean, it's uh there's nostalgia there for me. That was the first beer I tasted at the age of two, you know. Like you gotta, you gotta there's a place for it. Yeah, I guess, but then you you know, you move up to the especial, right?
You get the modelling, yeah. Yeah, they're all owned by MB, it doesn't matter. It's all the same. I was I was gonna say it's all it's all the same. All the same people.
Anyway, so it's always been kind of grinding that was the problem, but I was really struck uh, you know, because unlike, you know, you know, we were just testing out the because there was nobody. There was only tortilla nixtamal in in New York City that was at that time who was making their doing nixamalization. Yeah. And uh, you know, it was it was just I didn't understand why there wasn't good why there weren't good tortillas here. Same.
Same. I just didn't get it, but you actually did something about it. Yeah, I mean, honestly, so I read your article at that time. I remember connecting, I dropped off like six bags of corn. Oh, they're great.
I mixed them all, yeah. We nixed the malize them, but then the problem is is that like it's still it's I bought the uh Nyx d'imatic, which I know you're not a huge fan of, because you know the you know, the folks over at Rancho Gordo, that's the one that's gonna be. Whatever it takes, yeah. Yeah, whatever it takes. Uh but I think in in your book, you you give the actual reasonable solution.
By the way, if I I hope somebody is listening to this that has money, because if you have money, right? Just you you ha you're bringing in a good grinder now, really. Yeah, we we we actually uh we were inspired. I was telling this to Nastasia earlier. We we saw the Sears all and I was like, my God, if they can make a Sears all and not kill anyone, you know, we can we can make a a really, really heavy duty uh grinder and do the same thing that's tabletop.
So yeah, we made it. It's called Molinito. Um and it it's it's kind of a revolution. The stones look pretty sick. They're real.
Yeah, they're they're hand-edged in Puebla. They're uh from a quarry there, and uh it's it's legit. I mean, it's basically what used to be 10 grand, you know, and like require three phase electricity. Like you could not start any kind of nixdom all operation without a pretty significant, you know, investment. And it's not to say it's cheap, right?
But like we we make it work. But even like I know people, I think wasn't it Stupak that brought in like a grinder. He still paid a lot of money, but it wasn't it wasn't made for the US market, and so like you have to like j you know jury rig it and all this other you don't I mean we had the same issue. It's like we had at that time it was 2014, we had right around the corner from there, Rosie's was opening up. Uh who else?
I mean, there was like a it was just a moment 2014. There's so many places that were opening up and trying to do NYX to mall, and now we had this source of corn, right? That they could all tap into. And uh I'll never forget like opening day, they're all of their all of the grinders went down. Like they just they didn't they weren't built to last, you know.
So we spent a lot of time trying to figure that out because nobody could buy the corn we were offering if they didn't have the way to grind it. Right. Right. Well that and that's so how big are the stones on yours? They're five-inch stones.
It's it's a countertop. I mean, it's the size of this little, you know, this this interview table. It's about like it's like the size of a small microwave. And I mean small microwave. It's like a uh 80 pounds though, because the stones and the butter.
Well, well, that's the thing, right? So I mean, the the issue with the I mean the the the nystomatic, the issue with the nyxtomatic is it that the stones, they're not stones, they're steel plates. They're not as good. I think you can get a stone. I've never actually seen it, but I've heard you can get a stone after one.
I've never seen it. I haven't seen it. And the motor is troublesome. The motor will I burnt it out. It somehow came back to life once.
I don't know how I got it to come back to life. But grinding okay. So you gotta mentally separate people between like a single pass grinding situation, which MASS is either single or double, but it's not continuous, right? The way you're grinding it by machine. Whereas traditionally it was attrition grinding over time.
So like the the woman would would grind and pull back and the same thing again and again. She got multiple cracks at it, right? And it's backbreaking labor. Yeah. But in a single pass or double pass situation, you have to put a lot of power into it.
Oh, yeah. It's a real motor, not like a garbage cam motor. You need like a real motor. And that's I think where probably a lot of the money is, right? Is that is the motor and the stone.
I mean, to make it. Yeah. I mean, and stainless steel ain't cheap, you know, inflation. It's crazy. Yeah.
Oh my god. So how many pounds uh an hour? How do you rate it? It's about 60 pounds of masa an hour, which is a lot. Which is I mean, like for all things good.
We had a party there last night. Thanks for coming, Dave. Great to see you. I was I was I was working another party. You know, I was working.
He never goes to anybody. I was working, unless they're like by his bar too. I was literally wor I wasn't going to a party, I was working it. I was behind the bar. You know what?
Sons of bitches. Thank you, Joe. Uh yeah, but uh we uh I mean, it was um what were we even talking about? Uh just that you didn't come to the party. Uh what uh what other what other thing happened?
We were talking about how much power six pounds an hour. So yeah, uh it's about 60. So for all things good, you know, that was one of the we did a class in 2019, just before the pandemic. Matt Diaz came over, his partner Carlos. Uh they they hadn't quite uh launched the restaurant yet.
And like it helped launch their restaurant. Now they've got another restaurant in Williamsburg. Uh and it's like this has been a recurring story across the country and the world. Like everybody is now opening up a restaurant and diving deeper into it because it's such an accessible piece of equipment. Yeah, well, and the okay, so I I know this is gonna sound ridiculous to people who are at home, but for eighteen hundred dollars, if you're building a program around Massa, buy three.
Yeah. Use two, yeah, buy three, have the spare, and then I'm sure you'll fix it if there's ever a problem, and then they get it fixed. And that's how it, that's how you do a program. But that's the whole thing with the centrifuge, too. You make it cheap enough so the restaurant can buy three, use two.
Right. It's like no one, you know, no one's like, well, I guess we're gonna shut the Vitaps broke. Yeah. You know what I mean? Like, you know, and uh the thing that people don't get is that you know, when you're selling something hits niche, it costs a lot more, but it it looks beefy as as all hell.
It's a little, it's a lot for a home to have. You know, I was surprised. Like there are a lot of home cooks who've been buying it, you know. And it look, it just to go back, if you are a home cook, I actually I've been corrected. I I put out there, and of course the the tribe responded and was really apt, really quite upset about it.
You can get a puff, a tortilla puff from a hand grinder with one pass. In a corona? In a corona or a Victoria. Yeah. You can do it.
Oh yeah, all the same molds, right? They're all the same molds. They're all out of Columbia, strangely. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Or maybe like by weight, yeah, by way of Columbia from China, probably.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Pass through Columbia. Yeah. Just like the chili's. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Uh you did it. You get a book. Okay, listen, I had we had a group, uh so we had a we had a uh an intern who ended up going to work uh French laundry and then opened his own place in um where is he is in Taiwan or Hong Kong? I can't remember. And uh we had a corona hand grinder at my house, and we had all the interns from the FCI come over, and we were doing masa for like, what was that, like 30 people?
Yeah, yeah. And hand, right? And interns. Interns. And he was the only guy, he just stood there going at it like it how many hours did it, how many hours was he grinding that that corona?
If you want to make one tortilla, I'm sure you can get the corona to work if you break it in forever. That's another thing. I'm sure your thing comes ready to grind out of the box, right? You betcha. Yeah, I mean, that's the thing, like even the nixamatic, it takes a lot of wear down to get the the things to work properly.
Yeah, I mean, I didn't think we're I'm really happy we're plugging Molinita today. This is totally unexpected. Thank you. Well, it's the it's the problem. So the other the other solution that you uh pose in your book to to grinding, and I guess we should out today.
Oh, oh, out today. Congratulations. Thank you. Happy Papaya. And what month is it?
September 13th. It's Hispanic Heritage Month, which is why we're here. Thanks. That's right. You couldn't come to the party, but you did want to make sure we celebrated Hispanic Heritage Month in the right way.
So you came correct. I did, yeah, yeah, yeah. I was I was really thinking about that a lot. No, it's just I saw you were coming out with the book, and I was like, holy crap, we haven't talked in a long time, and obviously it's it's a subject I love. Let me back up one second.
So when you nyxtamalize, right, they needed to grind, right? So when you you're steeping it with the alkali is doing is softening the outside of the of the corn, because it's hard, right? Yeah, and also turning it into this amazing goo that takes the place of gluten. Right. That along with the fact that you're partially uh cooking some of the uh starch, and so that also holds water.
So that's why masa, when you grind it, is you know, stiff, but it has a lot of water. And if you grind it fine enough, that's why it can puff. You need a you need to uh need to hold enough water, but still be stiff enough that it it does the puff. Now, you make a bunch of interesting uh kind of things where you have like a table tortilla versus a like a frying tortilla versus all these different things. And it basically it comes down to texture.
You want to talk about those and like grind styles, how it might be easier to make one as opposed to the other? Totally. And for uh anyone who's listening, I do think that like the meat of this book, you're gonna want to do the kernel to massa process. It's like a lot of people have been talking about this book, sort of reminds them of tartine bakery and that like 40-page country loaf approach. Like we go deep on that um here.
You have to though. You have to. Otherwise, like you just don't know the variables that you're playing with here. Right. Um, but yeah, there's two, and this is sort of more of a product of like modern day, you know, industrialization of food.
We work with, you know, at the very sort of beginning of the supply chain, farmers, families who have been doing this in open-air, beautiful, you know, comal fueled kitchens for a long time. Um, and then we also work with tortilleras around the country. And in fact, uh El Malagro, which is one of the biggest in the country, that really kind of still does things this traditional way at a huge scale. Um, billions of tortillas made, you know, the old-fashioned way a year. They were, you know, the first time I went over there to ask them if they'd make a tortilla for us for this whole foods thing we were doing.
He's like, Yeah, what kind of tortilla you want? They had like 180 recipes for tortillas. I was like, for a corn tortilla, like what could be so different? And he kind of just broke it down along two kind of a very, very basic, like binary system. You have a table tortilla, which is the kind that puffs usually.
Uh, it's soft, it's like, as the name implies, it's meant to kind of be shared around the table. You make a taco out of it. Um, if you're Mexican, you will not start a meal until that's on the table. It's like, it's like utensils, you know. And then you've got a fried tortilla, uh, you know, which is really it's it's low moisture, um, so that it can it can just fry and crisp up really nicely.
Um, and in kind of a more coarse texture, which sort of helps with that moisture issue, um, so that it has like just a nice snap to it. And I think that that was basically just trying to replicate at the end of the day, a stale tortilla, right? Like a stale tortilla is just like loses a little bit of moisture, it's kind of it's cracking a little bit. Um those are easier to grind for people though. What's that?
Like the the coarser ones, the frying ones. Easier, easier as your first thing to try to make, although but it's not as worth it because once you fry it, it's not it's not the god send thing. My first tortilla was garbage, you know. But like there was some magic in having gone through that whole process and realizing this is it, like you're close. You know, like you can see that the flavor at least had developed, you know.
Right. Maybe not so much the texture. Right. That's a good way to put it because as soon as you start boiling it in the l and you pick it up out of the soaking solution, you're like, oh it's wild. Yeah, it's magic.
It literally is alchemy, you know. So I think not not literally, it's not turning to gold. Yeah, but actually it does. It kind of starts glowing, it's like got a whole new color to it. But yeah.
Okay, so uh I'll just say this don't let the equipment uh hold you back. In the in the book, you give very good instructions, and you're also like you're like, listen, just get to it how you can get to it. You know what I mean? And so the food processor, obviously, the problem with it is the grind's too wet. And so you're like, listen, just add a little massa jarina to it to get the texture back where it needs to be.
Yeah, you could do the oven, but like just cut it with some good masarina. You know, if you're gonna do it, buy some musta and the maserina, which we also offer, by the way. There you go. Yeah, well, that's it. So, like, so you offer that.
You also you you I see you have a collaboration with uh Hayden Flour Mills and Amazon. We did a 5050, this is normal. How's it taste? I haven't tried that yet. I think it tastes great.
Some people are confused by it. You know, I was talking to Rick Bayless. He's like, I I I appreciate it. I just I I want one or the other. Do you put lard in it too?
Uh I put a little bit of coconut, uh, a little coconut, if like coconut oil, depending on what I've got. Um asiento, I can use sometimes too. But yeah, some kind of fat, your call. That's great. It's delicious.
As much fat as I would put into a flour tortilla? Because that's a great wheat for straight flour tortillas. It's great. It like it really is a perfect mashup of like two of you know the world's greatest grains. You know, when I wrote the that original like years ago, that Nixon all, I got a smack down from a bunch of people from that area, all the way up to like, you know, the old uh you know how like you know how like old Mexican culture goes all the way to like Colorado, basically, southern Colorado.
So one of my good friends is from that culture, and he's like, You son of he's like, flour tortillas aren't bull tortillas. He's like, they're good. My family's been making them for hundreds of years. Oh, yeah. Suck it.
I was like, sorry, man. Yeah. You know what I mean? Like the flour tortillas we get in the supermarket are not good. You know, compared to compared to like the one that his grandma made.
Of course, of course, yeah. But like, you know, I think what I go into this book, it's like you understand, once you understand the history, like there's a there's a place for this stuff. Convenience has helped us all, you know, navigate having kids, you know, make more time. Like we we just went a little too far in that direction. So it's just good to kind of reconnect with like the true essence of what these foods are, right?
You know, which is which is tradition. And I think corn tortillas, the ones that we typically eat are more more even debased than the flour tortillas are. I I yeah, they they're both pretty, they both pretty uh they're both pretty bad. Yeah. Uh so when you make masa, how long do you think you can keep it before you have to make a tortilla with it and have it be good?
Cause Stas, you used to buy the you used to buy the masa, right? When you were a kid growing up, you could buy the masa. Yes. It depends. I mean, like a lot of folks will put, you know, additional cow in it, which acts as a natural preservative.
It's a basic agent. So, you know, Mexico City, for example, what I notice about the masa there is that there's a lot more calcium hydroxide. It usually has a little bit more of that yellow tint as a result. And it's and it tastes more like cow, but it does kind of extend that shelf life, you know, if maybe if it's just like masa unrefrigerated, maybe for like 12 hours. But if not, it's it's high moisture, right?
So maybe 75% moisture, and it's gonna, it's gonna ferment really quickly. So you gotta put in refrigerator, but like any starch, it starts to degrade, you know. So it really is something you want to enjoy as soon as possible, especially if you're going through all that effort, you know. Right. Yeah, yeah.
Have you noticed that uh like as people start doing their own stuff, they tend to overcowl it just to prove that they've cowled it? Yeah, let's just let's get this out of the way. 1% calcium hydroxide to corn is is a foolproof way. It's gonna give you the c the flavor of the corn that you want. It's gonna really, really kind of accentuate it in all the right ways.
It's gonna be the perfect balance so that it's not going too overboard tasting too much like calcium hydroxide, which can taste like bile, you know. Yeah, I when it's overdone, it's unpleasant. It's really not not tasty. What do you think about the idea? And you mentioned a little bit about starting with blue varieties just so you get a feeling for the pH, because you can get used as a color test.
Do you like that kind of I think it's super cool? I mean, I do uh there's a page in the book where I kind of show you like if you go too much in either direction, uh in either the acidic or the basic range, like you just get the totally different color. Like it's a huge lever for color. So you gotta be careful to really kind of treat that nicely. But yeah, you start to actually also realize that a lot of these colors that you see on the on the store shelves that are not refrigerated, that are just sort of sitting there uh for months at a time, like those are all manipulated with like acids, you know, like like bleach, basically, which is yeah.
Look, if you've ever done it yourself, it's like you're you it's kind of crazy and addictive and it makes you sad when you look at a store bunk t yeah. But uh so you you so you put the corn with the with the cowl, you you bring it up to the boil, and now when am when am I pulling it out? What do you like to look for for when it's done? Like a nice al dente quality to it, and like uh Italian al dente sense, not American sense, you know? Right.
Well, you don't want it all the way through. There's still some starchy stuff in the center, right? Because it's gonna it's gonna create kind of like this mortar, you know. Like cow actually is used as a mortar uh agent, right? Like it's used in cements and things like that.
And it kind of has that same property when it comes to niximalization, it's a binding agent. Um it through a process called crosslinking, which again, those 40 pages, you'll go you'll go deep into, I'm sure. Well, so when you're picking it up, so because here's the thing I think that's easy to to mess up, because uh I do think it makes some people have always like, well, can I pressure cook it? I'm like, no, it doesn't really know. I've never tried, honestly.
I'm scared of a channel. I love pressure cookers, but I I wasn't able to get a decent repeatable result. But because you it's you don't really want to just take it to where it is and then pull it right away, which is kind of the way pressure cooker stuff works. You want to cook it for not that long. I forget what what I usually would do, but then you have to let it ride.
You have to let it sit out. So the trick is right, how do you figure out when to stop it so that the carryover on the soak is the right amount? Like what's your what's your Yeah? I mean, I I honestly I go to the point where it's like it still has a little bit of granularity in the in the center, and actually I took some photos of like the actual perfect Goldilocks state. You have some beautiful cross sections of corn in this book, by the way.
It's like it's not fit for yeah, the show right now. We can't go into it. But it's like gene changes. I heard this is a family show. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So I saw that corn, I was like, oh yeah, corn. The photographers are like, why are we doing this shot? I was like, just my people need to see this. Yeah. I was like, I mean, people, you gotta buy it just for the corn cross sections.
You know what I mean? And the different states. Yeah. You gotta, you should have made it so that it folds out. I publisher, uh publisher puts the kayak watching.
The next go-around, I mean, like, you know, Stas, have you looked at this yet? No. I was like, oh, it's like Yeah. Wow. Yeah, right.
All right. So can you like the for anyone who's gonna end up buying this book, please buy it wherever books are sold. Yeah, you know. Buy the kitchen arts and letters. Yeah, I mean, I was gonna say, I I stopped by, and Matt is just the loveliest.
He's been thank you. Yeah, hey, Matt. Um, but uh yeah, I think what's interesting. If anybody can find some of the the errors, you know, this happens in any cookbook, please let me know and we'll we'll give you a mulinito. Don't do that.
I don't know. Don't do that. No, take it back right now. Let me know. Take it back right now.
No, because they're gonna find some little thing. You misplaced the comma, we shouldn't. No, no, no, no. No, no, like syntax, no punctuation, just like true fact error, let me know. Okay.
Yeah. Uh listen. Uh okay. Uh he doesn't guarantee that it's gonna be new. It's gonna be when he scraped off the shop.
It'll be the it'll be the prototype for sure. Yeah. Uh okay. So, and then uh, like, do you on the first cook, do you need that stuff to fully slip off when you pick it up? Like you Yeah, you definitely want to make sure that the the skins are coming off.
So, like the there is there are actually scientific like temperatures and sort of times that you can look at, which actually really depend on the size of the cook. Like you doing it at home is gonna be very different than a 2,000-foot cooking or 2,000 pound cooking tank at a tortilleria. So there are differences, but there is kind of like a sweet spot that I talk about. I think without going too much into kind of the technicals piece, just if the skins are sliding off and it's starting to taste like a tortilla, that's when I turn it off. Okay.
And like imagine that it's gonna cook for another 10% unless you shock it in ice, which is something that actually the cosme was started to do in the early days. I mean, I used to do it when I effed up. I'm like, oh my god! Yeah, and then I throw the stuff in. You know what I mean?
Yeah, and then how long do you let it soak? You know, um tortillas will do it for like honestly four hours because that there's so much residual heat that's that's sitting in there and it kind of accelerates that process. Uh I do it, I leave it overnight. I don't really think about it, honestly. I mean, I mean it's convenient.
Overnight's convenient. Yeah, the science just kind of happens to it. Now here's the thing. Okay, here's where it gets. Here's where it gets.
Oh boy. How much do you rub and rinse? Because to me, that's the thing. That's the whole thing. Besides from the grinding, yeah.
Yeah. How much do you rub and rinse? Rub and grind. This is getting off off the rails right now, Dave. Uh you know, I think like it depends.
There's so much um because corn is not made of gluten in any way, it you really have to make sure that you're controlling the skins that are that are kind of loosening in that process, not kind of they are loosening in that process. I do about a 50% wash off rate. Right. Because you want to have some of those skins. It's where the natural gums of the corn are.
They're gonna be what help bind all of these different kinds of uh the sort of the network structure of masa together. It's really kind of the glue of it. Um would you say more people tend to over rinse or more people tend to understand? People wash it clean because they think that like, you know, because it's fun. You're just like it's like a scab.
They're gonna make soup out of it or something. Yeah, scab and soup. Sorry, those are really good. No, I don't know what kind of thing. Okay, so like you rinse and then the grinding.
So for the average home person who, when they're just starting, they should probably don't do it in a vital, don't do it in a Vitamix people. Yeah, don't food processor, small batches, long, long time. Yeah, food processor, you could do it for a long, long time. And you you have to put a ton of water in there to actually let it spin. I mean, truly the Victoria.
Like, like I'm I'm now a convert. It's like the only reason we even sell it is because somebody was like, I did I look at the puff I'm getting. I was like, I detailed. How many times? How many times did you roll that through?
Once. Once I did, I don't know, man. I don't believe it. Have you okay? I I've done it.
I see it. Okay, okay. Okay. For like two tortillas would be great. Uh, have you uh people, what about the meat grinder people?
You know, I people do it. I haven't experienced I've done it out of a meat grinder and it was really not very tasty. But like I think where there's a will, there's a way. Whatever you can do to connect with this food in a more kind of deep, meaningful level, and like appreciate how much work goes into an actually really thoughtfully made tortilla. I don't, I don't care how you do it, you know, at the end of the day.
Right. Here, so here's uh someone did it in a bullet. What? And I was like, a bullet, like how, you know, that that takes even longer than a hand grinder. Yeah.
Uh at that point, just you know, get a cup and a mallet. Uh the the one that I did that, but the problem is it's still more equipment. Is I did it in one of the like the idli grinders, like the wet, like you know, the ones that they used for for chocolate now. Yeah, yeah, like a melanger. Yeah.
So, you know, you you blitz it in the food processor. You have to pre-treat it. Yeah. Yeah, I made that mistake. Yeah.
It was just like rolling off. It can't, you can't it like it can't go from corn to masa, but if you get it to that pre-grind, you can do it pretty stiff, yeah, and then for like hours. Yeah, you know, it mimics, you know, someone on a matate mono. Yeah. Um, but anyway, so that's still the thing, but don't let that stop you from getting the book.
But here's the cool thing. Because unlike when I was doing those experiments and you couldn't get decent corn, now you can get God's corn. You want to talk about the different flavors of the corn, and I gotta get some questions. Just like what people can look for in like, because I think they're like, Well, am I gonna go, am I gonna go like white, yellow, or blue? That's all they're thinking.
Right. Can you talk about like just like the the variance in the corn and what it does to the tortillas? Yeah, I mean, I think the first moment I realized that there was something really exceptional about corn, and you know, in the same way we think about tomatoes or wheat or whatever, it's you know, there was a farmer that I worked with in Oaxaca in the very beginning, and he we were joined by an agronomist. He said to take a bite of a kernel, a raw kernel, which is like not exactly palatable at that point. I was like, I yeah, my dentist would really have a problem with this.
Took a bite of it. He's like, What do you taste? And it was a yellow, really, really vibrant yellow corn. And I was like, My gosh, I don't have a sophisticated palate, just to be clear. So this is not me like waxing poetic.
This is genuinely what a a really unsophisticated person tasted in that moment. It was like carrots and butternut squash. It's like, yeah, beta carotene is something that is found in both this and you know, butternut squash and carrots. I was like, my God, you know, like it was a it was a revelation. Like there, when you are not breeding something out of what sort of is naturally sort of imbued in this corn to begin with, for the purposes of yield or you know, shelf stability or whatever, you have an amazing array of flavors.
So that was like my entry point. But every every variety has its own kind of distinct flavor, but also texture is really important. I think that's sort of to me the one that I would start with is like, you know, is it a really, is it a really uh light starch? Is it something that's gonna create a really airy tortilla? You know, the bolita that the variety that I first tried, um, which is what our yellow masarina is made of, um, is uh, you know, it's incredibly dense.
And it actually is the only corn I've seen that can support those 14 inch tlayudas that you see in Oaxaca and specifically that Central Valley. And what's cool is you start to understand like that's why all of these tortillas throughout Mexico, Central America look different, they taste different, because the corn is different. And so it's, you know, we could go on, there's like thousands of varieties of corn to choose from. But you know, we we offer about 20 on our site in any given time. And if you are not wanting to go through the kernel tomassa process, there's no judgment.
We you know, you can approach every recipe in this book with Masarina as well. And honestly, to me, there it's never been a better time to kind of explore at any at any angle at any level, uh, you know, all that Massa has to offer. You brought out a press too, right? Yeah, you know, so we were bringing out Cosby, actually, they would ask us to bring back. We gifted them a press from Oaxaca.
Is it one of the it's one of the pipe style ones, right? Flat plate pipe ones? Yeah, it's it's like steel, you know, and it was made probably with like lead-based paint. Uh and then uh, you know, just because it's healthy. And um we we kept bringing it back, and they were like, we gotta bring more back.
And I I just finally at one point was like, I think I brought like a dozen of them. They're really cumbersome to bring back. Um I asked the this lady at the market, uh, Doña Rosa, I was like, can we just can we like set something up here? Like, can we buy like a thousand? She's like, she actually said no.
Like she was like a hard no. Didn't want to make it. No, she was like really, really, she was hard to get. And then after like about a year of persistence, she was like, all right, fine. So we've had a great relationship with her for the last three, four years.
Uh we pay her whatever she whatever she wants at any time, and uh, you know, those those prices have steadily increased. But to me, it's like it is, it is the the simplicity of that that tool, it sort of belies like how huge of an impact it has on the actual finished tortilla. Yeah, because I have a bad one and the spacing's wrong, so I have to like put like a like a spacer into it to get my tortillas the right thickness. Are you a Ziploc or what what's your what's your you know? I like the thinnest plastic you can get, like the lighter the weight, the better.
So like a nice like little produce, you know, bag from the grocery store is great. Um we're actually, I think, I think we're gonna do like a recycled plastic, you know, bag that can kind of mimic that experience because it's just it's so hard to find, you know, you like you don't you don't you always have a plastic bag laying around the house. But Ziploc works. Parchment I find like bursts a little bit too. I mean, like uh, you know, I I've used uh saran and a pinch, but it didn't it sucks.
It sucks. Uh have you ever gotten good at this? No. I can't do it. You look great doing that though.
I mean do we have cameras that people can do it. Sometimes we do. But like I've I've tried it many times I'm like oh that's too much skill. Yeah yeah I can't do that. I need to have learned that for generations.
It's that's not something you can just there's there's some things that you know they're they're it's easier to do with chipatis. So if you're doing like like you know chipatis, that because the gluten holds you together it's more forgiving. Yeah much more forgiving and much more forgiving I think on the puff too. But of course no one's grinding their own flour for that either. No not yet.
No true all right uh let me get to some questions. Uh from Cypress Hill when is someone going to start producing a stone now a lot of the people here are calling them wet grinders but they're not referring they're referring to something that can grind Massa, not like wet grinder in the sense of Idlies. Yeah or wet grinders like IWA which is like a whole different ball game. Uh that attaches to a kitchen aid stand mixer hub specifically the flat style grinder used for larger masa machines. Uh they're currently using the Estrella which is a corona style one uh attached to a meat grinder motor that's hard dangerous I've seen people do that uh works well but it's not elegant as the closest I've gotten to being seriously maimed in the kitchen.
So you ever gonna you ever gonna make an attachment? Working on it. I mean like I've you know if anyone at KitchenAid is listening please give us a holler there's a huge tribe who wants to do this and we will we will we will develop it at no cost to KitchenAid. But no it's uh it what we've seen are attachments for for dry uh which unless you are dehydrating the Nyxtamall after you've cooked it and in cow and let it sit um it won't it won't run through there well. We actually talked to the folks at Mock mill.
Yeah. Early into the stones won't do it. You'd have to use your stone gum it up. But couldn't you? So like and though the stones that they put on the the mock mill attachment for the Kitchen aid has a much smaller stone than you're using.
They make and Como, which is the same guy. Exactly, exactly. They make a they make a one that's your size. They make one that's this big, but only for their freestanding, not for the attachments. I just think they're nervous that the power, they're not gonna be enough power to the other.
Yeah, there's not enough torque. Actually, sorry, it was coma who we talked to, not mock mill, mock millenni get back to me. Right. Um, we're doing all right. Um but uh it's uh there's so much torque.
I mean, those stones weigh, I mean, I forget the actual pounds, but they're a couple pounds, and you need a lot of you need a lot of uh power, as we talked about earlier to make them move. And you know, I think one of the problems with Kitchen Aid, specifically uh, you know, uh Cyprus is that uh no one wants to produce one. Look, I'm sure you could get it to work on the professional ones that are like 800 watts or whatever, like the new ones, like the big ones. But then someone's gonna put it onto an older unit, you're gonna get bad reviews, it's gonna be bad, and no one wants to do that. So I think like that's the backward compatibility is gonna make it difficult, right?
Maybe they'll do it for Hispanic Heritage Month next year. Maybe. Yeah, maybe. Well, but the thing is is like could they like how much of it's just the stones and how much of it's the power, the grind on the stones, and how much it's also basalt, is really hard to, you know, like we're talking about um it's very porous. You know, it's not you you have to continuously like cut them to make sure that they're actually doing their job properly.
I think that's another issue too. You know, I think granite is what might be used for the comos and the mock mills. Uh they use comp they use uh a composite synthetic stuff. Which is like it's aluminum, it's like it's like a grinder stuff. Aluminum oxide, right?
Or something like that. Yeah, something like that. Like it it it's the same stuff that you have on a on a bench grinder. Right. Right.
Yeah, which is like, you know, it's uh the problem with that with masa is that it heats up really high and it really kind of denatures the natural oils that you find in masa. It makes sort of a more gummy. Right. And I know with my Nyx d'imatic, when you mess up and you gum it like steams like a mother. Like it's uh okay.
Uh Jason Lynn, what's the most effective means of grinding masa without a wet grinder? Well, I mean, I I'm gonna I'm gonna say spend you know 45 bucks on uh on a uh Sereya or a uh Victoria. I'm sorry, Dave. Do you like that better than the food processor and adding? I do.
I honestly, the food processor to me is like it's it's you gotta do too much. You're compromising it. All right. What advice do you have for tortilla cooking consistency? I find that I can get the first couple to turn out well, but then the third or fourth sticks to the pan with a vengeance.
Haven't been uh quite able to diagnose if this is heat or a moisture management issue or both. Both. Both moistures I mean, you just start with your masa in the beginning, whether you're using masarina or you've done kernel de masa, and after five minutes, it's probably close to a stove, which is high temperature, maybe four or five hundred degrees. It's gonna dry out, you know, unless you've got a rag and even like a wet sort of like kitchen towel over it. Um and that really starts to do the smush test.
The smush test is a very technical way of telling if your masa is ready to go. Roll the ball, smush it in your hands. And if the outer edges of it are cracking, it's thirsty. Give it a little more water. Right.
Um, and then yeah, if you're going for a puff, I went deep into the puff. Yeah, oh, you did. And by the way, you guys need to buy the book. Buy the book. I can't buy the book, but also watch your video series.
Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. What's it called? It's called corn.
Colonel masa. Colonel de masa. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Uh but the book, the book goes even deeper.
Um that's a good thing. But but showing, like showing it, like flipping it and getting the puff. Because uh, I forget. It's uh I it's right when we asked you, I watched them all. But do you do you do the spoon down if it doesn't puff like throughout the yeah?
Like, I'll do like my fingers or you know, like a little kitchen towel and compress. The problem does anyone do open flame like they do for Shapati for the puff on the second thing, or no? People do it. I mean, I don't. I don't love that hard char as much.
I like it kind of just I like it nicely kissed on the Kamal. Right. So to me, when I first saw the the push down trick on the puff, uh I was shocked because I think it's like, oh, it's a contact issue. I'm not getting enough heat through the thing. Exactly.
You push it in contact and pushing it down makes it puff up. It's so counterintuitive. We should have written this book together. Next time. Next time.
So listen, the other thing is uh on the on the puff, why don't you because some people think it's just uh oh no, but it tastes different because the steam on the inside. You want to talk about the texture of one that just puffed properly? Yeah, I mean, like we talk about crumb shots all the time, you know, like we just like cut this cross section of bread and you've got that nice, like kind of like spongy interior. It's the same sort of idea. You know, you've you're sort of getting this nice like uh sort of souffle that's really cooking through the center.
And a puff, a puff is like very elusive, I think. It's sort of like this magical quality, but it's actually it's quite basic in terms of what is actually happening. You're getting moisture that's trapped in between kind of two like seared edges, basically, two seared sides. And when the heat hits that moisture, it expands. And it's allowing it to cook through in a really even way.
Um so you know, a puff consists of really five. I'm not even gonna do this off the top of my head. Uh a puff is actually there are five things that are gonna be at work there. Compression, which we just talked about, so you can kind of like coax it if you're not you can't do like a un really unformed tortilla puck. It's not gonna really happen.
Well, you're trying to get you're trying to get the bottom surface to get the heat transfer. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So compression, moisture, um, elasticity. So like those skins are actually gonna really help, like bubblegum, you know, like kind of give it some uh some nice skin to to expand.
Um what else? Grind, you know, you really need a fine grind to get that done. Hard to do with like yeah bits. This is why I think it's not a bad idea to practice puff with with uh massa harina. Yeah.
Yeah. Practice puff with it so you know about the puff. And temperature. You know, like I I used uh in our office for that kitchenette like Colonel Lamasa series, like a 400 degree you know hot plate, basically. And it's like not quite as hot.
I did I actually took uh this is like the nerdiest thing I ever did. I took a razor uh laser thermometer to Oaxaca and Mexico City and like just tested everybody. And it was like average was like six, six, six Fahrenheit. Did you get a lot of side eye? No, people are like, how hot is it?
And I was like, it's real hot. It's uh 666 degrees. Hot as hell. Uh also uh I can't stress this enough. Uh if you're just having it around for recipes, whatever buy the supermarket garbage, but it it is universally rancid and stale by the time that you get it.
Yeah. Uh so you should really buy the the masa arena from macienda and not the one uh look, the supermarket when it's cheap, it's available. I'm not trying to like yuck anyone's yum, but I'm saying it's not the same product. No, I literally talked to somebody who remains anonymous uh who used to work for a really large uh uh he was executive leadership at one of these types of companies, and he's like, you know, actually everything that's good goes to food service. The heads and the tails of these runs go into retail.
It's like the worst of what is being produced. So you know, but it it got me, it got me where I am sitting with you today. So I'm grateful for that. So uh Jameson uh Jameson writes in I regularly do a hundred grams of white macienda chef grade, hand mix, knead, saran wrap, the whole ball when I finish cooking. Well while I finish cooking, I then divide uh into four.
So that's uh that's pretty big tortilla, right? 25 of masa of of harina. The grams, the grams are a struggle for me. Yeah. Uh yeah.
Uh I wouldn't divide into four and cook on cast iron two at a time uh to serve immediately. I get two noticeable textures. One is smoothish, leathery, the other granular. It seems almost random out of the same batch. Any thoughts on why I'm seeing this and which version you think I should be chasing?
Also, can you speak uh to uh which of your products you'll be using at the Cosme dinner? And loves your tortilla press and your masa right now. Thank you so much. So kind. Um I'm gonna I'm gonna say um, because we probably don't have enough time, email us at info at masciana.com and you will be shocked at how deep we go into the answer.
But um, if I'm understanding correctly, man, there's a lot going on there. Uh I think it honestly it usually ends up boiling down to to moisture, which we talked about a little bit already. So do that smush test. Also the temperature of the comal, surprisingly, like depending on what kind of you said cast iron. Um those are really tricky.
You know, they like retain so much heat. We got two more minutes. You can go. This is just a let me know that I'm I'm keep going. Keep going, keep going.
Um yeah, but uh we we can dive a little bit deeper together, but that's probably those are the kind of the two most common areas that affect uh and impact texture. And then Cosme, I mean, Cosme is doing a beautiful tasting. And it's also not just the uh the like the food itself, which is phenomenal. I was there on Sunday. Um the cocktails, like, you know, the amount of of just like uh the the catalog of cocktails that can come out of masa or nixtamal in particular is unbelievable.
Tawino, you know, like fermented, it's it's delicious. Yana did an amazing job. Yeah, you know what? I've never done they're not nixed. I've never done a lot with uh chicha.
You ever do any stuff with that? Or you're just uh nix to mall only kind of kid? Not just, you know, I've got a I'm I'm loyal, but not not it's just time. You know, got a kid. That's the thing.
That's it. All right. Uh Craig uh just a masa question. Uh Craig Ware wrote in a million years ago you had a blog post about nixtimalizing rye grains. That experiment yielded any significant results.
I think you mentioned using Lye as well, but warned of the risk associated. Do you have any ratios to share? I think I gave the ratio on the blog and Quinn made the blog accessible again. Uh it's delicious. Rye is a pain in the butt because uh the the thing about corn masa is that there's no texture like it.
It's awesome. It's like it's wet and dry, it doesn't stick to you. And uh rye is very sticky because of the pentasands in it. So it's it's kind of a pain in the butt but it's delicious. But you know, it's not easy.
I wouldn't say everyone should go do it. Right. But it it is cool. So listen, uh Jorge, thanks for uh coming on. Go buy MASA from uh Kitchen Arts and Letters.
I think we have a uh uh Patreon discount. So if you're a Patreon member, you're gonna get a discount on the book at uh Kitchen Arts and Letters. Who knows? Maybe we can work out something with Macienda for our Patreon people. I'd love that.
Hey, you know, if you need that blog post to live anywhere on the internet, we we could use the SEO. It'd be great. All right, yeah, yeah. Well, we'll we'll work something out. Thanks for coming.
Do you have anything else uh coming up people should go to? I mean, we're popping up in cities all around the country, but uh yeah, stay tuned. A lot of fun content coming out. We did a series called Macienda Presents, which if you've not seen just some of the greatest minds in masa around the country just doing amazing stuff. Um, but yeah, it's a movement.
I don't know. And on the way out, give me give me three corn varieties that are gonna blow people's minds that they should buy from you. Oh man, Bolita, I'm a young yellow bolita, glue conico, uh, and uh Choco Yule. All right. All right, thanks so much for coming on, cooking issues.
Thanks so much, Steve.
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