Corn vs flour tortillas

this video is sponsored by own maze a company that works with people like me to raise money for nonprofits go to omae's comm slash Adam and make a contribution to support the James Beard Foundation donate ten dollars and you'll be entered to win a trip an amazing food and art tour of Mexico City more on that later in the great corn versus flour tortilla war a pivotal episode occurred in 1952 when a guy named Glenn Bell opened a hamburger and hot dog stand in San Bernardino California he conveniently opened up his stand across the street from the Mexican restaurant that's Gustavo Ariano journalist with the Los Angeles Times and author of the book taco you essay how Mexican food conquered America every night after he closed down he'd go across the street to the Mexican restaurants order their hardshell tacos then go back to his restaurant and try to decipher how to make these tacos eventually the owners of the restaurant they go up to and say look we know what you're trying to do you're trying to get our recipe but instead of doing a mockery out of our food let's just show you well come coming to the kitchen and we'll help you out Glenn Bell admits to this story in his 2010 authorized biography taco Titan some super nice Mexican American cooks showed this clueless white guy how to make their tacos then he turned around and sold their idea in his chain of restaurants that would become Taco Bell he used his social and economic privilege to make himself extremely wealthy with their food Bell never publicly named the restaurant in that story never gave him credit a lot of people naturally view this story as a textbook case of cultural appropriation there is a pretty strong counter-argument to that which we shall return to at the end for now let's just take note of something that we can learn from the Taco Bell menu Taco Bell sells hardshell corn tortillas they call them crunchy tacos they sell soft-shell wheat tortillas they just call them soft tacos but Taco Bell by far the largest nominally Mexican chain of restaurants in the United States does not sell these they do not sell soft corn tacos and why not when the softshell corn tortilla is the original tortilla originating in pre-columbian America we didn't even grow in this hemisphere until European bonia lists brought it over well I have a theory that there are certain food textures that it can be particularly hard to love if you didn't grow up eating them in Japanese cuisine for example there are a lot of soft kind of wet kind of gelatinous textures that to Western palates can often come off as slimy in the case of corn tortillas soft corn tortillas the texture is mealy which I'll admit is kind of tough for even me to handle even though I really prefer the earthy stronger flavor of corn tortillas this purely textural hang-up is totally obviated if you chuck the tortilla into a deep fryer which is how we get tortilla chips and hardshell tacos white people love a fried corn tortilla as you can observe in any great classic Mexican American restaurant like this one margaritas here in Macon Georgia I love that place and you can get soft corn tacos there too but nonetheless there exists a stereotype that corn tortillas are the real deal while wheat or flour tortillas are for gringos one of the many problems with stereotypes is that even when they're kind of true they leave out crucial parts of the story in this case the stereotype omits the fact that flour tortillas are also from Mexico what we do know though is that flour tortillas originated in northern Mexico that still we're in Mexico to the stay flour tortillas predominate that's also why for decades flour tortillas have always outsold corn tortillas in the United States because those were the original tortillas that Americans were used to just because of the proximity to the border indeed if we ever want to think about why certain people eat certain things the first thing to consider is what grows where they live wheat grows better than corn in northern Mexico hence wheat flour tortillas only white people eat tortillas go talk to the people in Sonora go talk to the people in love Willie Owen and Chihuahuan the border let's go talk to that tex-mex folks who have been right there in the border for generations and for them flour tortillas is what they grew up on they totally speak Spanish they look like you and I flour tortillas our tradition except for some people for a lot of Mexicans until recently in Mexico they did not grow up with flour tortillas so they see it they immediately think oh it must be a tex-mex Obama a lot of Mexicans they still feel very wronged by Americans and what Americans do to Mexican culture so it's obvious to me why they would have such a such defensive posture and it's with all due sensitivity to those very real and in my view very legitimate grievances that I will nonetheless now gingerly make the argument that there is another reason why we tortillas have become so popular and it's the same reason why wheat breads have become popular almost everywhere in the world it's not purely a legacy of European colonialism it's all about that gluten those proteins and wheat that make wheat dough stretchy no other cereal crop has nearly as much gluten as wheat and gluten makes breads pliable I can bend this flour tortilla back and forth as much as I want I really have to work to make it break whereas this corn tortilla crumbles very easily it's brittle because it's gluten free and it is therefore structurally incapable of wrapping foods as securely as a flour tortilla can here is a San Francisco or mission-style burrito one of my top ten favorite things to eat my favorite one comes from laughing planet and Bloomington Indiana this sadly is not that but anyway those folded ends just would not be physically possible with a corn tortilla flour tortillas have another dare I say intrinsic advantage which is that they're way easier to make corn tortillas are tough you got to get corn and nixtamalization like calcium hydroxide lime the resulting flour called masa harina is mixed with water to make a dough that is very delicate because again no gluten in corn it's crumbly successfully cooking one of these takes some special gear and a practiced hand pour tortillas are very very hard to make right flour tortillas you get flour you get some water you get some lard maybe baking powder if you're from Texas you mix it up Pat them out and there you go now corn tortillas have some intrinsic advantages health-wise at least when it comes to the diets of first world peoples who generally eat too many calories the corn tortilla is a lower calorie product it's also rich in magnesium which is a mineral that a lot of people don't get enough of but the problem is because corn tortillas are so Ellicott lots of taquerias double them up to make them more sturdy thus negating the whole calorie advantage because you're eating more tortilla I don't know maybe we're overthinking this Gustavo Arianna has eaten more tacos of varying kinds than any human being alive and he has a pretty simple philosophy if it's good why not why not so can you make ducky can you fry flour tortillas and public colorado they do and they make chicken tacos out of them can you make burritos out of corn tortillas it's a little bit hard but in Ventura County they do have something called corn burritos they just roll up these really thin corn tortillas and make teeny-tiny burritos out of them which are pretty good so me personally I like flour tortillas for kis IBS because I love gues ideas but I love a good corn tortilla if I just want to roll something up but it really really depends I cannot pick one or the other certainly I'd agree that nobody should be shamed for liking the food that they like to eat but that's different from cultural appropriation cultural appropriation is when say I a member of a group that has marginalized and Exploited and perhaps even conquered your group comes along over to your group and says whom that thing that you have I like that and I'm gonna take it and then I use my unjustly acquired social and economic advantages to maybe sell that thing for a lot of money in a way that you couldn't because you're not as privileged or maybe I just misrepresent that thing to the world and everybody believes me because I've got a bigger megaphone than you that's what makes appropriation different from other kinds of cultural exchange which leads us back to Glenn Bell Glenn Bell never named the Mexican restaurant where he learned to make hard shell tacos but Gustavo Ariano figured it out and wrote about it in his book turns out it was a place called mitla cafe in san bernardino and it's still there Ariano went there and interviewed herma Montano who's late father-in-law taught Glenn Bell how to make the tacos that made him rich and what did she say she said that son of a [ __ ] gringo cheated my family he plundered our cultural treasures and he commodified them oh wait no that's actually not at all what she said what she actually said is good for him he was a self-starter and he did push those and there you go like I said I think that cultural appropriation is a real and bad thing but in this instance I think that erm amantani owes opinion matters way more than mine now I hope that we just did a little bit to promote the kind of culinary cross-cultural understanding that the James Beard Foundation works to promote you may know the James Beard Awards that they give out to chefs they also give out scholarships and run other programs to promote the culinary arts and to help developing talent it's a great organization that you can support right now by going to omae's comm slash Adam donate $10 and you're entered to win an ultimate food and art tour of Mexico City you and a friend will get flights hotel and even a little bit of walking-around money if you win this I will be very happy for you but I will also be furious because there's no other country on earth that I would rather eat my way through I am on record as saying as much in this earlier video okay you can travel to one country for an all-you-can-eat tour where do you go probably Mexico would be my first race so for your chance to win that food and art tour of Mexico City go to amaze calm slash Adam and enter now donate ten dollars to support the James Beard Foundation thanks to omae's for sponsoring this video I'm now going to eat about a thousand tacos

Channel: Adam Ragusea

Views: 1,012,126

Keywords: flour tortillas, corn tortillas, mexican food, tortilla (food), how to make corn tortillas, tortilla recipe, how to make tortillas, flour tortillas recipe, flour tortillas from scratch, tortilla recipe mexican, taco bell, glen bell, gustavo arellano, ask a mexican gustavo arellano, taco usa how mexican food conquered america, taco usa, food history, james beard foundation, james beard award, cultural appropriation, tex mex, tex mex food, northern mexico

Id: GBeCmbKiY0Y

Length: 10min 10sec (610 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 24 2020