El Burro

Tortillas are at the very heart of Mexican cuisine. As one who loves to cook and learn about food and its preparation, I have gotten quite an education about corn. It is a very big deal here and transgenico corn is a major political issue. There are literally thousands of varieties of corn here. In certain villages there may be as many as 26 different varieties growing, each dependent on differing amounts of sun, soil condition, etc. Having lots of different varieties helps the plants to be more insect and disease resistant.

And for those of you who have never had a real tortilla there is nothing the real thing.
I certainly have eaten my fair share of fine Mexican food in the States, but I never had a real tortilla until I came here.

It is like the peaches we used to get directly from the orchards in South Jersey. You could not even drive them home. They were so perfect and delicate even the slightest bump damaged them. They were the real peaches that very few ever get to taste. Manna from Heaven.
And that is what the tortillas I get are like. A woman in La Union makes them for me from the corn she and her family have grown. I can pick the color corn I want –white, yellow, black, blue.

And her tortillas are the best. You have to pull a bit to bite through them as they slightly tough and chewy with wonderful flavor.
The corn is shucked in a very unusual way. Normally in La Union people simply do it by hand, but here they use el burro, a ring made up of corn cobs bound together on the outside by wire.
They say they learned about it from people from Santo Domingo de Morelos Pochtla, a village near the coast and it really does the job.