Poca Madre and Other D.C. Restaurants Grind Imported Corn to Make the Perfect Tortilla

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Part of The United States of Mexican Food

Inside the kitchen at Poca Madre, past the hotel pans full of grilled pineapple paddles and ducks confiting in their own fat, chef de cuisine Faiz Ally holds a pinkish-purple ball of ground corn between his fingertips. The restaurant paid a premium to obtain a rare breed of kernels from Mexico, and Ally has already taken painstaking care not to taint the product while par-cooking, soaking, and grinding it. Even though he’s been handling masa dough for months now, learning by trial and error and taking a four-day crash course in Mexico City, the little cornball can be intimidating.

If Ally doesn’t flatten the ball in a tortilla press with just enough restraint, he won’t get an even circle. If he doesn’t lay it on the flattop grill in one swift motion, the tortilla will develop pockmarks and an uneven texture.

Working with the corn demands confidence, care, and respect, which is why Ally looks into his hand and talks about the plant like it’s just waiting for him to slip. “It can sense fear,” he says, speaking from the experience of someone who’s already messed up making masa every which way. Transforming kilograms of raw kernels into masa is a time-intensive, expensive, and persnickety process. But Ally considers himself lucky to work with the bb-shaped pellets of red corn grown by farmers in the central valleys of Oaxaca.

Poca Madre is part of a growing number of D.C. restaurants that have started grinding imported corn in-house. They all insist that once diners have experienced the depth of flavors and textures inherent to heirloom varieties, there’s no going back to the powdered flour that’s snuffing out the old breeds across the U.S. and Mexico with its affordability and convenience.

“I think there’s an inherent refinement to this food, and to the flavor of a perfectly made tortilla,” says Victor Albisu, the chef-owner of Poca Madre. “A texture, an aroma. I think this is the kind of food that you eat with all your senses, and it’s unforgettable if done right.”

Poca Madre uses four heirloom varieties of Mexican corn (clockwise from left): blue, yellow , red, and white

Albisu’s restaurant is relatively small, sharing a two-part space with one of his casual Taco Bamba locations on the other side of a wall in downtown Penn Quarter. At Poca Madre, the kitchen has the time to press and cook tortillas to order, then tuck them inside a napkin to steam. Albisu originally thought making masa from Mexican corn would be a nice gesture for a fine dining restaurant. In the lead-up to opening last summer, it quickly became an obsession he describes as the central theme of the restaurant.

“I love this so much because you know somebody’s doing this on the other side of the world,” Albisu says. “It smells the same. It feels the same. It’s beautiful.”

In December, Poca Madre introduced a taco omakase menu, a format popularized by Enrique Olvera at Pujol in Mexico City. For two nights per week, Poca Madre offers an option following the Japanese format of a chef’s tasting menu. Instead of sushi, the restaurant offers for every iteration of masa Albisu and Ally can think up.

On one night, that meant a “chips and salsa” course that featured a crunchy blue corn tostada as a canvas for artful dots of five-chile sauce, cotija cheese, and chapulines (grasshoppers). There was a sope — a thick, open-faced tortilla — served with burrata, caviar, and beet powder. Later on, memelas — miniature sopes that typically get griddled with a pool of salsa inside — appeared with chorizo made from shrimp bathing in a seafood pozole broth. A miniature tortilla was a savory counterpoint for slow-roasted duck al pastor with pineapple-habanero salsa. Depending on the color and coarseness desired in the application, Poca Madre makes masa out of white, yellow, blue, or red corn.

Clockwise from top left: Poca Madre chef Faiz Ally carefully monitors the temperature of water while par-cooking blue corn in cal, pours red corn into the molino with the right amount of water, kneads it by hand to feel for the proper texture, and forms a ball on the tortilla press.

While Poca Madre is the only place in town doing a taco omakase, it’s one of at least six restaurants to start grinding their own Mexican heirloom corn in the past four years. Oyamel, the José Andrés vehicle just around the corner, claims to be the first in D.C. to adopt the practice, in 2015. Espita Mezcaleria, the Oaxacan-style restaurant in Shaw, came next when it opened in October of that year. The other three — Cielo Rojo in Takoma Park, Urbano 116 in Alexandria, and the Tacos, Tortas, Tequila/Buena Vida complex in Clarendon — all opened this year.

All of them get their corn from a wholesaler called Masienda. Founded in 2014 with a mission to support Mexican farmers, the purveyor supplies restaurants with a variety of naturally evolved (not genetically modified) corn that picks up distinct flavors from milpas, traditional farms where corn is grown in the same soil as beans and squash.

Making the base of masa, known as nixtamal, is a process that’s been performed for thousands of years. It starts with three ingredients: corn, water, and cal, or slaked lime, a calcium hydroxide compound that helps soften the corn and adds nutritional value. Corn must be par-boiled, soaked for hours, and rid of husks before it can be ground in a molino, a portable mill that can be tough to come by in the U.S. Most have to be retrofitted with American power plugs to turn on an electric engine.

The machines feed corn in between churning wheels made from volcanic stones. Grooves on the stones have to be sharpened for them to work properly, which means each restaurant that has them has a preferred power tool to do that job. At Poca Madre, Ally has burned through dozens of diamond-tipped rotary tools trying to do it right.

Faiz Ally sharpens the grooves on a grinding stone for Poca Madre’s molino.

At Urbano 116, which opened in Old Town this January, chef Alam Méndez Florián insisted on a five-horsepower engine for his molino, which rumbles and shakes as it rips through kernels in half the time it takes other machines.

The Oaxaca-born chef now keeps one foot in Mexico City, where he runs acclaimed Pasillo de Humo, and one in Northern Virginia, where he was initially recruited as a consultant. His knowledge of masa has also taken him to Copenhagen, where he spent six months aiding in tortilla production at Hija de Sanchez.

Méndez Florián considers corn to be the base of Mexican cooking. He’s not particular about the color of corn he uses, but he tries not to open more than two bags at a time to keep any of the product from getting stale.

“If we don’t have good tortillas, we won’t have a good restaurant,” he says.

His nascent restaurant is already going through about 48 pounds of masa per day, he says. One employee is solely dedicated to shaping and cooking tortillas that will wrap up pork carnitas, grilled octopus, or lamb barbacoa that name-checks the Oaxacan town of Tlacolula de Matamoros, where the meat is cooked in casseroles with lots of steam instead of a in a pit in the ground. Urbano also uses fresh masa to thicken moles — Méndez Florián makes a blonde almond variety with braised short ribs and dark black sauce with grilled Cornish hens — and as the base for a skinny barbacoa tamale. A dessert tamal mixes masa with cinnamon-spiked Mexican chocolate.

In Mexican restaurants, women almost exclusively hold the tortilla-making positions. That’s because many have years of experience making them at home. In Mexican culture, it’s an unspoken agreement that women are entrusted with masa. Many men won’t go near it. Méndez Florián doesn’t have those misgivings.

“It’s something to be proud of,” he says.

Yesenia Neri Díaz rose from prep cook at Espita to partner in Las Gemelas. — Espita’s Yesenia Neri Díaz has been making tortillas since she was 7 years old.

Perhaps no tortilla maker in the city takes more pride in their job than Yesenia Neri Díaz, who leads the three-woman crew dedicated to working with masa at Espita Mezcaleria in Shaw.

Whether it was divine intervention or dumb luck, Neri Díaz only applied for a job there because she received a literal sign, a poster in the window with a tagline of “Masa, Mole, Mezcal.”

Neri Díaz was more than qualified to make masa. By the time she was 7 years old, she was preparing tortillas alongside her mother in Ahuacuotzingo, a small city in the Mexican state of Guerrero. By the time she was 10, she was practically a master. Espita owner Josh Phillips calls her “absolutely the queen bee of masa.” She enjoys her work because making tortillas makes her feel like she’s at home, where she used to grind corn on a metate (stone slab) and cook masa over a wood-fired comal.

According to Phillips, Espita might sell 1,100 tortillas on a Friday night. Given the demand, the staff uses a sheeting machine that churns out perfect circles of dough. Some tortillas rip during this process — they’re cut up and deep-fried, making Espita the rare kitchen to serve heirloom corn tortilla chips. (Chef de cuisine Ben Tenner goes nuts when people say they taste like Fritos.)

Espita Mezcaleria is the rare restaurant to use Mexican heirloom corn for tortilla chips.

The differences in density are clear in the light bite of a blue corn chip compared to the heartier crunch of its yellow cousin. The prices of guacamole ($10) and salsas ($3 each) are designed to cover the cost of the fried tortilla fragments.

Neri Díaz’s crew does shape one tortilla by hand: the large, deep blue tlayuda that gets spread with lamb, beans, and cheese.

Since opening nearly three years ago, Espita has ditched the idea of labeling itself as a Oaxacan restaurant. Phillips, a former Philadelphia bartender who developed a serious mezcal obsession, says that certain ingredients were too expensive or simply impossible to get.

Now he now wants people to think of Espita as Oaxacan-inspired. The kitchen sources as many dry ingredients as it can from Mexico, then combines them with seasonal goods form the Mid-Atlantic. The number of moles at one point has escalated to seven. Now it’s down to two.

Paring down the masa operation, however, is out of the question.

“You can’t say that you’re a great Italian restaurant if you’re not making your own noodles or a great pizza shop if you don’t make your own crust,” Phillips says. “You’ve got to have control over the whole product.”

Cooks finish heirloom corn tortillas on the plancha at Espita

Clockwise from top left: Espita uses a sheeting machine to form tortillas quickly, separates tortillas with holes in them to make chips, uses two different plat tops to par-cook and finish tortillas, and hand-presses big blue corn tortillas as the base of tlayudas.

Over at Oyamel in Penn Quarter, chef Omar Rodriguez is fanatical about controlling the ratio of ingredients in masa. The restaurant goes through 2,000 heirloom corn tortillas per day, he says, and it has a hulking industrial molino to prove it. He insists his masa, made entirely from Masienda’s Olotillo white corn, grown in coastal Oaxaca, is shocked in ice before soaking and bagged hot right out of the grinder.

Growing up in the border town of McAllen, Texas, Rodriguez always had tortillas on the table. Because of geographic loyalties — his grandparents came to the U.S. from the Northern Mexico state of Tamaulipas — his family often ate flour tortillas. Now, when he needs a quick snack at work, he’ll throw avocado in a fresh corn wrapper and add salt. He says it’s the Mexican equivalent of a PB&J.

The same tortillas are the foundation of tacos serving Yucatan-style cochinita pibil (barbecued pork), Michoacán-style carnitas, Norteño shredded goat, and Oaxacan chapulines. Day-old tortillas get toasted on the grill and thrown into a mole Poblano that takes three days to make. Oyamel has even made masa ice cream.

Leading the kitchen at Oyamel has ruined the taste of tortillas made with powdered mix for Rodriguez. He’s become uber-senstive to bitter cal, the alkaline agent that gets boosted in commercially available brands.

“The more I’ve eaten these,” he says of Oyamel’s tortillas, “I can taste the difference.”

A brisket barbacoa taco from Poca Madre made with rare red corn from Oaxaca.

Foursquare

A Growing Number of D.C. Restaurants Grind Imported Corn for Perfect Tortillas

Urbano 116

Poca Madre

Oyamel Cocina Mexicana

Cielo Rojo Restaurante

Espita Mezcaleria

Buena Vida Restaurant Clarendon

The United States of Mexican Food

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