The Madre and the Nuevo: The Impact of Chef Johnny Curiel and the Reinvention of Mexican Cuisine in Denver

by John Broening

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You might as well start with the corn tortilla, which is as central to Mexican cuisine as bread is to French cuisine.

If you run a restaurant kitchen, there are a number of different ways you can handle a corn tortilla. You can buy tortillas from a broadline distributor, where they have most likely been frozen and stuffed with preservatives like potassium sorbate and calcium propionate.

You can buy fresh tortillas from a local tortilleria or even buy their reconstituted masa and make your own tortillas, as Chef Dana Rodriguez has done.

You can acquire nixtamalized corn from local corn supplier (nixtamalizing is the process where you soften dried corn for grinding by hot-soaking it in an alkaline solution), then grind it yourself in an industrial corn grinder, hydrate the ground corn, shape it into tortillas, and then cook them.

Or you could do what Enrique Olvera does at Pujols in Mexico City: buy the dried corn yourself, nixtamalize it, and continue with the laborious and skill-intensiv…