How Tortillas Lost Their Magic
How Tortillas Lost Their Magic
www.theatlantic.com How Tortillas Lost Their Magic
Most American tortillas taste like cardboard. Chefs, restaurants, and companies are trying to restore the corny glory.
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39 comments
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They have a good point. I did research into cornbread for a project and it's suffered from the same issue as tortillas. Most cornmeal that you buy in the store nowadays tastes like sawdust and has to be enriched with a bunch of stuff to make it preserve longer. Originally southern-style cornbread had zero added sugar in it, but most recipes nowadays call for a tablespoon of sugar to balance out the flavor of the sawdust cornmeal so it ends up just tasting like nothing. You don't do that if you use good, heirloom corn, and it actually has flavor.
It ultimately comes down to the quality of the corn and the method that they use to process it and to maximize profits. Stone ground cornmeal yields a better product, but is less efficient.
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I'm going to be honest here, I'm highly skeptical of the quality of cornmeal leading to lower quality tortillas. This is mainly because we already know why they are bad in the states. Not to mention the comment iteself is written like it was a conclusion made in conjecture.
Please cite the study you read/wrote that concludes cornmeal is the reason behind why corn tortillas are so bad in the us and that the deterioration of cornmeal is what led to it.
(Spoiler for anyone reading this, they didn't have a source and were talking out of their ass about this subject. 0 evidence to back up their claim. Typical of lemmy.)
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The quality of any ingredients has a huge effect on the intensity of flavors. Check out the differences in free range/ field chicken eggs vs indoor/caged/ feed eggs
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I don't need to check out the differences in other foods because that isn't relevant to this discussion. It may be relevant but then you would need to provide evidence of that connection, when it would be probably easier to cite the original source they spoke of, instead of having to provide two different sets of data.
I'm also curious how the degradation of cornmeal even happened, which I'm sure this study would touch on.
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There are a few heirloom plants that bear fruit with more intense flavor than industrial crops, which is a pretty well known fact if you are into food as a business/ home cook/ attend farmers market etc
Tomatoes here https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-heirloom-tomatoes-taste-so-good/
Farmer brags about corn http://masienda.com/blogs/learn/about-heirloom-corn#%3A%7E%3Atext=In+this+case%2C+heirloom+corn%2Con+to+the+next+generation.
Mentions of the distinct taste https://www.reddit.com/r/farming/comments/15a83zu/why_the_nostalgic_flavor_of_this_heirloom_corn_is/
https://tinybutmightyfoods.com/why-heirloom/
Like this is common knowledge, it's specifically selected for flavor and grown in different ways. Not sure why you think one plant is going to be the same as another variety of the plant.
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The point of my comment was to call out the comment poster because it's obvious they were using their own conjecture and just saying "I did a study." Very common in this community because people just trust what other people say on face value. The fact they never followed up with anything at all means it was a bot or a dumbass just spouting off at the mouth about some bullshit. I appreciate you taking the time to find similar studies though, thank you.
I was not arguing anything except, "please show me where you read that" because I don't know about this subject. But if you make a claim about a subject, you should be able to back it up or you're lying.
I find it hard to buy that Mexican tortilla companies somehow buy only heirloom corn and American companies don't. We know exactly why the tortillas suck in the US and it's not cornmeal degradation ffs.
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Dude you are just super ignorant about food.
Like - can you imagine the idea that the tortillas he's talking about are not factory made? Like maybe locally grown produce is used for hand made stuff?
You should know their are regional differences in how foods are produced.
People aren't going to hold your hand so you can what's common knowledge. But
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I absolutely reject the notion of food science being common knowledge. If you can't back up what you say with anything when asked, you are simply lying, full of shit, or haven't actually proved what you claimed.
Yes I know there are regional differences in how food is made that is my whole point. I'm saying there is difference in quality between the two countries, but that has no link to degradation of cornmeal which is what the op claimed, said "I did a study" and everyone just believed them when they quite literally cannot backup what they said.
How hard is it to keep your conjecture to yourself or just simply backup what you claimed?
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People aren't going to hold your hand. If you don't believe it, go look it up and refute it.
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That's not how it works tho. If you make a claim, the responsibilities of evidence are on the person who made the claim.
Can't back it up? Then it's bullshit.
This is day 1 scientific method stuff, bud, it's not about holding hands, it's about whether you actually have any repeatable data to backup your claims. If you don't, you probably shouldn't be saying it as fact.
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It is when your position is this
I’m going to be honest here, I’m highly skeptical of the quality of cornmeal leading to lower quality tortillas.
This is ignorant about how food works ( not food science, food in general), on top of the rest of your comment being condescending.
You aren't going to get a response from that dude, so it is working like that. Be responsible for yourself.
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39 comments