Small victories are the way to go I say. Sure you can wage wars or attempt huge sweeping political change but I’m perfectly happy with the tiny triumphs in my life. It seems that my grocery lobbying efforts have finally paid off.
Here in the French and Scottish influenced corners of Canada, you all know I bemoan the lack of Mexican food and ingredients nearly non-stop. Not even in Halifax can I find the blasted basics I need. After years of jousting at supply windmills trying to get one of the simplest culinary starting points for Mexican food into the local stores, this week my local megamarket finally caved and started carrying corn tortillas *. Yes, I’m that excited by plain corn tortillas. I don’t even care that they’re imported halfway across the continent from Texas and probably not the freshest examples. They’ve just made my life much, much simpler.
* Entirely another matter from commonly found flour tortillas that are actually a result of the food industry deciding they were cheaper and easier to make and thus thrust upon the masses decades ago. Corn and flour tortillas are night and day different. In taste. In texture. And of course there’s the whole gluten issue for those that think they need to avoid it as well as actual Celiac sufferers that really do need to avoid the stuff lest their intestines explode.
Behind the scenes and unbeknownst to you kind readers I’ve been working on a tortilla making project in the background. Dry sacks of Instant corn masa flour can be had here fairly easily and inexpensively. I’ve even toyed with making my own fresh from local field (flint) corn using the centuries old nixtamalizaion process – basically soaking in lye to remove the outer husks and in the process alter the chemistry enough to change the nutritional availability and morph the flavour into that ‘tortilla’ taste. But the device to ultimately form these round gems that are the culinary backbone of so many dishes in Mexican cuisine can be tricky. Masa dough isn’t like flour dough in texture and consistency (or taste) so gadgets like pasta rollers simply won’t work. Corn is it’s own creature. And the old-school process of making them one-by-one is certainly a labour of taco love, especially if you’re fighting with just a rolling pin in your hand. A worthy and tasty effort mind you but one that doesn’t fill me with joy when the tostada urge hits.
Tinkering on that project won’t stop because I’m the first to vote for freshly-made tortillas but the fact that I can now grab a dozen for two bucks down the road means the culinary world to me. It’s been like England without tea or India without curry to date. No longer will I have to mail order ten dozen frozen * from my favourite factory in Vancouver where the shipping made them $6 a packet. I’m probably not the sole cause of this addition to their stocks but thank you to whomever back in the corporate Toronto office decided that we here in the Maritimes had been taco-, tostada-, and enchilada-less for far too long.
* The simplicity of corn tortilla’s ingredient list makes them freeze pretty darn well in a supply pinch.
Bear in mind too that my snack food of choice is corn. Popcorn certainly but you can’t get me away from tortillas and salsa without risking a limb. Yet good tortilla chips here are $5 a bag and the unenlightened Nova Scotia tax agencies can’t see past the word ‘chip’. Anything in a bag and they deploy their social engineering to slap on 15% whether it’s junk food coated in salt and fake cheese powder or the plain, unadulterated base for simple dishes i.e. a ready to eat indulgence or what amounts to an unprepared ingredient. Odd because that exact same list of ingredients fried into taco shapes is tax free just two aisles over, albeit shoved into a cardboard box and nearly inedibly stale. The system is completely arbitrary and per usual, just another tax grab by the nacho-hating man. Luckily, this new supply looks sufficiently plain to keep their hands out of my tortilla pocket until I can get my own kitchen production tweaked.
That same bag of tortillas should cost me about a quarter if made at home and will of course be drastically better quality since I don’t have to pay for marketing and delivery drivers. Corn, salt, shortening, and oil – the entire ingredient list – is incredibly cheap which is why it feeds so many people in Mexico. At that rate even I might be able to satisfy my disturbingly vast appetite for the crunchy little devils without breaking the bank. And all this before I even begin to extol the virtues of fresh tortillas and chips on the taste front.
So rejoice enchilada lovers of Eastern Canada. Dance in the streets on taco night. We have at least some small supply of corn tortillas out here now. If I can get my machine engineered, we might even have some made from our own corn soon.
