Midwestern Mexican Restaurants and Tortilla Makers Are Embracing Indigenous Nixtamalization

One afternoon last December while sitting bored in a meeting, I was scrolling through Instagram when a post stopped me in my tracks. It was by Granor Farm and Madre Masa & Tortillas, and featured two stacks of thick corn tortillas — in Michigan maize and blue. Whoever posted this wanted you to see every ridge, groove, and grainy edge indicating they were made with freshly ground corn. Such images aren’t uncommon in my feed, but something about this particular photo made me linger. Are these tortillas from Michigan?

I simply had to have them.

Cut to me scrambling to wrap up work before 10 a.m. on a Friday in February, several frantic texts with Madre Masa co-founder Rebekah Ostosh trying to arrange a last-minute visit, and two and half hours of driving before I arrived on a porch in Grand Rapids to claim four fat packages of tender, bubbly tortillas.

Is it worth driving hundreds of miles — deadlines be damned — to pick up an order of tortillas you placed on Instagram? Absolutely.

Madre Masa/Omar Arredondo/Aves Films

Ostosh and her partner Renata Fernández Domínguez launched Madre Masa in 2022 to offer their community tortillas using nixtamalized corn grown in western Michigan.

Nixtamalization is an ancient food process used by pre-Hispanic peoples like the Aztecs and the Maya. It starts with drying corn kernels and then steeping them in a solution of water and something alkaline, traditionally lime ash. Then the kernels undergo a magnificent transformation — they change color and become soft and pliable. This is when maize turns into masa, a corn dough used to make tortillas, tamales, sopes, huaraches, and hundreds of other delicacies. It’s still the foundation for many Latin American and Indigenous cuisines today.

There’s nothing quite like the sensation of biting into a tortilla made from freshly ground corn. Unlike the millions of shelf-stable tortillas found in the aisles of the local supermarket, you can smell the difference of a handmade tortilla. It’s at once sweet and nutty. The texture, too, is formidable; they’re strong and flexible, yet still have a bite to them. When you apply just the right amount of heat on the griddle, the tortilla’s surface puffs out to create a dreamy moonscape of gently toasted cresting hills giving way to textured craters. The flavor complements any type of protein and is robust enough to hold its shape. It invites sampling on its own — a singular experience that brings out the best in any recipe it’s paired with.

Ostosh and Fernández Domínguez nixtamalize and stone-grind organic blue dent or yellow Wapsie Valley corn using a countertop molinito — an electric mill equipped with volcanic basalt rock. Each Friday, they transform their home kitchen into a makeshift tortilleria and sell packages of fresh tortillas and masa ($8 for a pack of 10 or a pound of masa for $5) to customers who place orders by sending a message to their Instagram account. In the short amount of time since Madre Masa began its home-based tortilla sales (a benefit of Michigan’s 2010 cottage food law), the operation has made satisfied customers out of locals and Detroiters alike.

In recent weeks, Ostosh and Fernández Domínguez have made appearances on community radio talking about their gorgeous tortillas, and have traveled to other parts of the country to meet with others working to reclaim their ancestral connection to maíz — including a visit to Austin for Encuentro de Maíz, a convening that celebrated the building blocks of Indigenous foodways.

Before tortilla sales can commence, the couple must start the nixtamalization process the night before. They bring the corn kernels to a boil in a water and calcium hydroxide solution and allow them to cook for 20 to 45 minutes. The kernels steep overnight for eight to 12 hours until the outer cover of each one falls away easily and takes on a toothsome al dente bite. Then from a countertop in their kitchen, the couple begins loading the kernels little by little into a molinito, which does the work of grinding the grain into fluffy shavings that are patted down into a ball of dough. From there, they make smaller, ping pong-sized balls that will make their way into the tortilla press, and eventually the comal for cooking.

“We founded Madre Masa & Tortillas really just out of a need,” says Ostosh, who began tortilla sales with Fernández Domínguez in 2023. “We wanted to be connected to better, more wholesome masa, and we wanted to incorporate our local farms as well.”

Madre Masa is one of a small number of mostly women-led food businesses in Michigan embracing nixtamalization. While Madre Masa uses the bounty of Michigan’s agriculture to supply the corn it needs, others have turned to innovations developed by companies like Masienda, a masa harina, heirloom corn, and cookware supplier, that brings the materials needed to make masa in homes and restaurants. Others are working with local farmers, bringing with them the stories of their ancestors, one kernel of corn at a time, to a Motor City urban garden near you.

Nixtamal has been around for thousands of years, and you’ve probably had fresh tortillas at some point in your life. But it’s also likely that the homemade tortillas you’ve seen advertised at your friendly neighborhood taqueria were produced with GMO corn using a decades-old innovation — Maseca — meant to make it more convenient to whip up a batch of masa with a simple bag of corn flour and water — but that has left a lasting legacy of bad tortillas that are often derided for being flavorless and lacking in texture. Over the past two decades, more restaurants across the United States and elsewhere have been centering and celebrating the ancient practice.

The now shuttered Costa Mesa, California, restaurant Taco María, helmed by chef Carlos Salgado, was an early adopter of a more traditional nixtamal dough; the restaurant turned to Masienda to import its supply of non-GMO landrace corn (referring to corn that has been domesticated and locally adapted and grown by small-scale farmers). And Tortilleria Nixtamal, which launched in Corona, Queens, in 2009, is believed to be the first New York establishment to employ the process. More recent examples include Texas restaurants such as Nixta Taqueria, El Naranjo, Xochi, and Suerte. Back West, Three Sisters Nixtamal in Portland, Oregon, is exposing a new generation of diners and home cooks to the beauty of freshly made nixtamalized corn tortillas.

Minneapolis tortilleria Nixta, established in 2020, has also played a role in acquainting diners in the Midwest. Last summer, the Twin Cities maker expanded to include a full-service restaurant called Oro by Nixta.

Among the modern-day OGs in the region for nixtamal is Yoli Tortilleria in Kansas City, co-founded by Marissa Gencarelli and her husband, Mark, in 2016. Marissa Gencarelli was among the three dozen or so people who attended the two-day Encuentro de Maíz event in Austin earlier this year. Yoli Tortilleria won a James Beard Award in 2023 for Best Bakery and is the supplier of tortillas for nearly 100 Kansas City-area restaurants. But when she got her start making masa, initially as a form of therapy, she found herself scouring the internet trying to find individuals who were more well-versed who might be able to provide guidance.

“For us, connecting with others really required reaching out outside of our immediate community and seeing who else was doing things of this sort,” says Gencarelli, whose search for folks with nixtamal knowledge steered her outside of Missouri, and even into the southern hemisphere, where she learned about a tortilleria there that was also doing this work.

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Adriana Jimenez, 32, was born in Mexico City and brought up in metro Detroit but her immigration status growing up prevented her from traveling to her home country until she was 25. That’s when she tried her first tortilla from a molino in Mexico City made with heirloom corn from Oaxaca and was instantly enamored.

“I didn’t know what nixtamalization was and was like, ‘How does this taste so good?’ Our server was like, ‘Oh, it’s because we nixtamalize them here.’ I had heard of nixtamalization, but my parents didn’t nixtamalize and I didn’t grow up with anyone that nixtamalized,” says Jimenez.

That experience took Jimenez on a years-long journey to try to change that for Detroiters, who like her, may be of Mexican background, but who’ve not been exposed to the process.

Jimenez’s research and tenacity has paid off. In April, she announced the opening of Vecino, a modern Mexican restaurant in Cass Corridor. With its debut, the establishment will lay claim to the city’s only restaurant masa program, utilizing corn sourced from Masienda — which for the past 10 years has provided businesses like Vecino with the ingredients, education, and tools needed to make their own nixtamalized tortillas. To head the masa production, Jimenez brought on the talent of Ely Gutierrez, a native of the state of Guerrero, who had spent more than a decade working in a tortilleria prior to joining the Vecino team.

For Jimenez, the opening marks her reentry into the family business. When they first arrived in Detroit, her father started out working in waste management but went on to take over Arandas Tire Shop in 1998 from a relative. Eventually, her parents entered the restaurant business (one of her cousins is Nancy Diaz-Lopez, who co-owns several food trucks and restaurants in Detroit, Downriver, and Macomb County) and ran two Mexican eateries in Waterford.

Growing up in a restaurant family, Jimenez was always surrounded by the hustle and bustle of the back of the house. But like any other Mexican restaurant in the area, the tortillas that came out of her family’s business were factory-bought from La Michoacana Tortilla Bakery in Detroit’s Mexicantown neighborhood. The tortilla factory uses Maseca, a product by tortilla manufacturing company Gruma that dehydrates corn dough into flour, requiring only warm water to transform it into dough. Generations of time-pressed modern households, restaurants, and tortillerias across the Americas have turned to Maseca to simplify the tortilla-making process, but many argue that its use has chipped away at consumers’ understanding of this millennia-old tradition.

When Jimenez finally did get to return to her homeland as an adult, she was blown away by the city’s thriving dining culture, especially the stark differences in tortilla quality. “When I went to Mexico for the first time and we went to a molino, I was like, ‘This is crazy that we don’t have access to this,” she says. “Once you look into the history with industrializing corn in Mexico, you’re like, okay, well, this isn’t the best way to make [masa]. We’ve got to go back to a process from thousands of years ago to actually have what we were meant to have.”

Masienda has made it easier for restaurants to adopt a masa program, as everything — from the equipment to the masa harina in bulk — is handled by the company.

It was during a front-of-house apprenticeship with Blue Hill at Stone Barns F.A.R.M.S. where Masienda founder Jorge Gaviria rubbed elbows with some of the most influential chefs in the country at the time — chefs who were having deep conversations about sourcing and “flavor forward” agriculture. This got him thinking about how these themes could apply to corn.

Gaviria landed his first client in Cosme, a lauded New York establishment owned by celebrated Mexican chef Enrique Olvera. Gaviria initially pitched the idea of opening a tortilleria and supplying Cosme with the tortillas and masa. Olvera insisted he wanted his masa program run in-house, but instead asked for corn sourced from Mexico. The tortilleria idea was scrapped, but now Gaviria had the makings of a supply chain.

In those early days, Gaviria says most of his interactions with folks when he shared the gospel of masa were met with blank stares, and if people were familiar with masa, he says, the majority relied on Maseca.

“Unless you came from an oral tradition within your family — and even then, unless you were the eldest daughter, there’s so many things that determined the knowledge transfer — that to me even if you belong to any one of the cultures that celebrates masa, it was hard to relate to, because there was just no direction,” says Gaviria.

Over the years, Masienda has gone on from sourcing corn directly from Mexican subsistence farmers to producing masa harina, manufacturing equipment like the molinito used by Madre Masa and Vecino and tortilla presses for home use, and publishing the Masa cookbook.

“My belief has been that if you have the resources — the information, the tools, and the ingredients — that holy trinity of factors is what enables people to discover this for themselves,” says Gaviria.

Today, Masienda estimates that it works with roughly 1,000 restaurants, tortillerias, and other food businesses across the United States. According to the company’s 2023 sourcing report, Masienda sourced 2.8 million pounds of heirloom corn from independent farming communities across seven states in Mexico.

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In Chicago, chef Diana Dávila Boldin — a two-time semifinalist and one-time nominee for the James Beard Award Great Lakes category — says she once dreamed of opening a molino on the city’s north side. Such a place, she mused, would give her nearby access to nixtamal for her restaurant, Mi Tocaya Antojería, situated in a residential area in the city’s Logan Square neighborhood.

But building a stand-alone molino costs money and setting up a masa program takes up a great deal of kitchen real estate, in addition to the requiring significant labor. “If we were to do all of our nixtamal for our masa for our homemade tortillas, I would have to raise the price of the tortillas to subsidize two full-time people to execute it,” she says. “Since we’re not a taqueria, and I don’t just focus on masa, it’s just not something that we have done.”

Amado Lopez, co-owner of Casa Amado in Berkley and a 2023 James Beard Award semifinalist in the Emerging Chef category, echoes that sentiment. He opened Casa Amado in 2021, which was quickly recognized for its guisado-centric menu, featuring flavorful pork chilorio, birria, and tomato-jalapeño braised bistec, which all hint at his culinary prowess. But his emphasis on guisados is also a reflection of his limited kitchen space. In Lopez’s view, one barrier keeping him from doing a fine dining restaurant on a full-time basis is his lack of a masa program. “If you look at anybody who’s doing great Mexican food, through their vision, through their eyes, and through their talent, they all have one thing in common, which is they make their own masa,” he says.

Dávila Boldin found a different solution. She purchases fresh masa from a trusted source in Chicago’s tortilla world, El Popocatepetl Tortilleria. The company distributes tortillas wholesale to clients across 30 U.S. states and parts of Canada, as well as offering tortillería supplies to high-end restaurants, bars, taquerias, and supermarkets across the Chicago area. Those supplies include masa made from nixtamalized corn — some of which is made using Masienda’s imported heirloom corn (Chef Rick Bayless had a hand in helping the 70-year-old business make the transition to ditch GMO corn in 2019).

Dávila Boldin’s menu of antojitos offers a kaleidoscope of masa-infused creativity: heirloom tetelas — triangles of masa stuffed with summer squash, quesillo, and epazote and topped with a pepita salsa macha; tacos made with hand-pressed tortillas encrusted with Chihuahua cheese; acelgas (chard) and broccolini al carbon made with a velvety salsa chilmole that is thickened with masa. Even the drinks get the maíz treatment: The Chicana is made with sotol — a distilled spirit from Chihuahua where she has family ties — infused with charred tortilla, along with herbal liqueur, Mexican oregano, lime juice, and foaming bitters.

The popular Logan Square restaurant draws inspiration from across the varied culinary landscape of Mexico, which Dávila Boldin describes as “nostalgic Mexican food — food that you grew up with.”

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Diana Gomez’s masa odyssey begins this spring with the planting of some 300 to 350 heirloom variety of dent corn called tuxapeño at Crane Street Garden on Detroit’s eastside.

Gomez is the owner of Eater Award-winning norteño-style taco truck Tacos Hernandez. She currently makes both flour and corn tortillas by hand, but turns to that bag of Maseca for the corn tortillas. She longs for the day that she can grow her corn, helping to stave off the harmful effects that climate change is having on our food supply.

“I do believe strongly that our food system could collapse,” says Gomez. “You go to the grocery stores, and they’re packed, and people are just purchasing and purchasing and I feel like there is a point where [our food system is] not going to be able to perform how we want it to or how we’ve been relying on it to, due to climate change. Smaller gardens and farms are what’s going to save that.”

Toward the end of their first growing season in 2023, Crane Street Garden co-founder Rachel Nahan met Gomez selling tacos from her food truck at the East Warren Farmers Market. “When I tasted [the tacos], I was like, ‘Oh, wow, this is special. This is a taste that I haven’t had in a really long time, I have to meet the person who made this food,’” says Nahan.

This year, Gomez, along with Nahan, are embarking on what Gomez calls their “F around and find out phase” to see if they can produce the right kind of corn on the land to make masa to supply to her taco truck. Nahan, who moved to Detroit in 2022 to help launch the garden, says that she is utilizing interplanting and companion planting techniques — similar to the Three Sisters planting method. The practice was adopted by Indigenous communities in North America some 3,000 years ago and calls for planting corn, beans, and squash together in groupings which helps to nourish the soil and promote a self-sustaining ecosystem.

Crane Street Garden is among roughly 1,400 or so urban gardens and farms that dot otherwise vacant land across the city; it sits on nine lots that the garden organizers acquired from the Detroit Land Bank Authority. The garden works with Keep Growing Detroit’s Garden Resource Program, which provides assistance ranging from supplying individual households with starters and seeds throughout the seasons to infrastructure support, bookkeeping assistance, and advice on purchasing property from the city for larger-scale operations like Crane Street’s.

Whether the corn harvest takes off or Gomez is able to produce all of her tortillas using the Crane Street corn isn’t necessarily the point for the taquera and urban gardener.

“For me, it’s less about scaling up and being able to sell volume. I think it’s more the connection to the person whose hands are going to be preparing the food,” says Nahan. “The journey of growing something together and seeing how that works out — from a farmer-food entrepreneur relationship, I think that’s really special too, to see how that works.”

For burgeoning brands like Madre Masa, one of the best Midwest tortillerias to look to for inspiration is the aforementioned Yoli Tortilleria, which Marissa Gencarelli co-founded in 2016.

Becoming a major tortilla supplier wasn’t on the couple’s bingo card, their aspirations were more in line with what Madre Masa is currently doing and what Tacos Hernandez and Crane Street Garden are hoping to do soon. Once they landed their first commercial clients, including chef Alex Staab of Chicken N Pickle, a chain of restaurants and sports bars equipped with pickleball courts that operate in several states, Yoli’s trajectory took off.

Marissa Gencarelli says that much of Yoli’s early days were trial and error, first in their home just trying to achieve the correct pH balance in the water and reaching just the right temperature to achieve the optimal tortilla.

That learning curve grew exponentially once demand for their product increased. Soon after, Gencarelli traveled to California, where she met Guillermo Campbell, founder of Campbell Machine in Santa Fe Springs. In the tortilla world, she says, Campbell is considered the gold standard for custom-built tortilla-making equipment. Investing in a commercial-grade molino made all of the difference, she says.

As for corn, Gencarelli says Yoli sources grain from Missouri and Illinois, and occasionally from Mexico City-based Tamoa, which works directly with farming communities in seven states in Mexico. Gencarelli uses Tamoa for special occasions, likening it to ordering a good bottle of Champagne.

“It’s very fun for us to go ahead and compare [corn] from the mountains of Estado de Mexico, or wherever it might be, and then compare it to one that grows in the Midwest. Once we grind it, sometimes the nuances are just so small and that really validates my point that when possible, you should always source local, because the taste is just going to be really good,” Gencarelli says. “And plus, you build a relationship with all those farmers.”

With Yoli Tortilleria considered an early adopter of nixtamal in the region, it’s her turn to impart wisdom to folks like the women from Madre Masa in Grand Rapids, who are just getting started.

“I feel like it’s a huge responsibility to make sure that I’m always there for everybody that asks for it,” says Gencarelli. “I had a lot of conversations with Renata [Fernández Domínguez] about what has worked and what hasn’t worked for us. I told her all the details [about] our machines and everything. I want a lot more [people like me] out there. The more of us who are out there, the more that we’re going to be able [to make] this change.”

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Ostosh and Fernández Domínguez’s charming home, a foursquare with a gambrel roof, sits on the southeast end of Grand Rapids, where early each Friday morning they get to work assembling a couple of hundred tortillas ahead of the steady flow of customers who, like me, will arrive at their doorstep a few hours later.

Mexico is very much intertwined in the couple’s history. They first met through mutual friends. Fernández Domínguez is a native of Veracruz and Ostosh spent four years living in Mexico City. The two overlapped and lived in Mexico City for a year before moving to Grand Rapids in 2018. They were drawn to the walkable, tree-lined western Michigan community because it reminded them of their previous home. The interior is a love letter to Mexico, with intricate, handcrafted crucifixes and brightly hued decor adorning the walls, accumulated from their travels.

What was missing: A good tortilla.

It’s one of the things that Fernández Domínguez hasn’t been able to stop thinking about since she moved to the United States for the first time 26 years ago.

“[My mom] would always go to the molino de nixtamal and get the masa and make the tortillas handmade. So I grew up basically eating that kind of tortilla,” says Fernández Domínguez. “In all the years that I’ve been here, I haven’t found a tortilla that tastes like that, that smells earthy, and [that has] the pure ingredients.”

Lockdown times during the earlier days of the pandemic gave Ostosh and Fernández Domínguez the time to begin their journey. They invested in a Masienda-brand countertop molinito with five-inch volcano stones, equipment that they say helped them overcome the biggest barrier standing in the way of their nixtamal dreams.

Fast-forward to this past February. When I walk through their front door, I am immediately greeted with the sweet aroma of freshly ground masa. We sit down at their long dining table. Ostosh offers me a shot of Abasolo, El Whisky de México — made with 100 percent ancestral nixtamalized corn — while Fernández Domínguez fires up the comal to just the right temperature. They have a special demonstration awaiting me in the kitchen: my first eye-witness account of their nixtamal tortillas coming hot off the comal.

Once Fernández Domínguez confirms that the comal has reached close to but not much more than 450 degrees Fahrenheit, we gather around for the show. When all of the components of a tortilla — the consistency and texture of the masa, the moisture level, the temperature of the heating surface — are perfectly aligned, the tortilla puffs up like a dreamy little pillow. As anticipation rises, Fernández Domínguez chimes in: “You’re lucky, with that puff,” while I let out a mini grito, “Ahhahaha!”

“Is there anything more satisfying than that?” adds Ostosh.

Almost frantically, I reach for the newly puffed-out tortilla, made with organic blue dent corn — always grown within 25 to 100 miles from their Grand Rapids home. I study every bite, going over the texture and mouthfeel with my tongue, inhaling the aroma as if I were dipping my snout into a nice glass of wine. I marvel at the color. It was blue corn by name, but now in its sacred tortilla form, it’s turned into a shiny obsidian. A friend remarks that it looks like a sheet of nori.

I feel like a newborn nixtamal masa baby, learning to crawl toward tortilla greatness. In the weeks since I visited the Madre Masa home, I’ve begun making my own tortillas, after ordering a seafoam-color tortilla press that matches my old-school Detroit kitchen, and a couple of bags of masa harina from Masienda. I’ve yet to achieve the iconic puff that Fernández Domínguez appears to have mastered with relative ease.

So far, my tortillas come out with defined, craggy wrinkles, like the creases on the face of an old woman who’s imparting masa wisdom. She lets me know that my tortillas are no less flavorful, even if they’re not perfect, and provides me with another lesson for next time. Maybe my comal isn’t hot enough. Or perhaps I’m not using a sufficient amount of water. I’m reminded every time I pull out the press and get ready to make a batch of blue or white heirloom corn tortillas for a plate of “no sabo kid” breakfast tacos that it’s because of the work that so many before me have done to keep this ancestral tradition alive.

Rolling each little ball of masa also just helps me get out of my head whenever I’m feeling stressed — a simple reminder of the therapeutic qualities of spending time making your own food.

Fernández Domínguez says it’s all part of the process.

“As you go deeper, you start growing and identifying the pieces that resonate more with you,” she says. “It’s your unique journey.”

Additional photo illustration credits: Maize photography provided by Graydon Herriott/Masienda; masa and molinito photographed by Fatima Syed.