Desi Makkai Masa

Indian corn | Why makkai masa | The method

My field corn stories have been long, long, long in gathering.

Really they started with the Nepali watchman who’d throw some seeds in the garden after the November monsoons, Jack-and-beanstalk-style, and watch them grow without further care. He loved the ease, and the corn reminded him of home.

Following his lead, we tried to coordinate the planting of maize, beans, and squashes: it made sense, after all, to follow the old Native American “three sisters” logic of co-planting which allowed beans to climb on the corn stalks and the squashes to spread on the ground below. But maybe my patches were too small and too crowded to allow the squashes enough sun, or maybe they just preferred the manure piles that were usually nearby at the same time of year, waiting to dry out a bit before we’d use them elsewhere in the garden. In the end, we got squashes (kabocha, ash gourd, sometimes others but always from the curing manure pile), we got a few beans or a lot, but mostly and unfailingly we got corn. Redheads or blondes depended on the seed variety de l’année, but we got corn. [The corn silk is itself a thing of value, easily made into a tea with hot water or into a tincture with alcohol, but more on that in some other post.]

The word “corn” is a bit of a misnomer; I should really be calling it maize or makkai because “corn” is an Old English term referring to any grain rounded and grown in a certain region. In England, cornfields had wheat; in Scotland they more than likely had oats; in India there were vines of pepper-corns (maybe pepper was allowed grain status because of its value and production quantity?), and in the Americas, why, they had corn. The name “maize” entered after the 16th century, from the Taino mahiz or mahís, to Spanish maíz, to Zea mays, botanically speaking. “Indian corn” it was in the 17th century, though the “Indian” qualifier was dropped sometime after and it was always understood that the crop was native to the Americas.

There began the ascent of corn and its exclusive association with American maize: it was already central to traditional central and south American cuisine in the form of masa for tortillas or tamales, a thickener and flavor-enhancer in (for example) champurrado or hot chocolate; purple corn was a colorant and flavor-giver in Peruvian chicha morada, white corn was used to make atole, then into grits in the American south and then either visibly or invisibly in cereal, sodas, confections, all forms of processed food, poultry, fish, burgers and even the milk Americans drink. Corn once paid for slaves, corn then fed slaves. Its ubiquity provided metaphor for hair: cornrows (and racism). When corn was in abundance, a market excess created by farm subsidies—high fructose corn syrup went into everything (and is now demonized enough that companies can market “real sugar” as a ‘health food’—{eyeroll}). When gas ran short—corn to the rescue in the form of ethanol, which now causes apple farmers to think twice about growing apples for that quintessentially American pie because, of course, corn-for-ethanol is more lucrative than apples.

In this way was corn both basic food and the antithesis of food.

Indian corn

Elsewhere in the world, maize colonised the colonies, to borrow an observation from Michael Pollan, but its industrial uses are even now less dominant. In wide parts of Western India, millets came first and then corn, and then only wheat [with the green revolution]. Rice was a niche product, belonging to certain water-rich regions. To this day, makki ki roti + sarson ka saag [a mustard greens preparation] is a Punjabi match made in heaven. Or, in parts of Gujarat, makkai rotla or paniya: “paan” refers to leaves; a thick bread roasted between palash leaves is “paniya,” Sheetal Bhatt tells me, in messages accompanying her as-usual evocative photos.

The processing of maize in these areas is really restricted to grinding. Very likely because maize is a second or third staple cereal, concerns about pellagra arising from heavy reliance on un-nixtamalized corn, or even the urgency of making maize more nutritionally useful, doesn’t so much arise. Maize remains a rustic ingredient used to produce loved-but-mostly-rustic foods.

During our travels together in the tribal belt of Eastern Gujarat, Sheetal and I encountered corn often, in forms just harvested or stored as flour for making rotla. The images below are of the very spunky Mali-behn in a village near Polo Forest, Vijaynagar, who, realizing I was trying to capture the movement of her tossing shucked maize onto a corner pile, bemusedly obliged me by posing and allowing me to focus my camera.

Mali-behn’s daughter-in-law with the tinkly laughter roasted us maize ears freshly picked from their farm one evening as the sun went down. Makkai and cha—a surprisingly companionable pair—was the essence of their simple, generous hospitality.

Sheetal often remarked on how expertly the local women would measure out corn flour, mix only as much flour was needed to make a single rotla (thicker than rotli or roti, though both are unleavened breads) at a time, and hand-shape these expertly, leaving their individual fingerprints on each truly hand-made bread. Delicious though these were, most locals of course have started to prefer wheat rotis, and the thought of further improving the processing of maize for ease, texture, nutrition or taste never seems to have occurred.

Why Makkai Masa?

It’s quite simply my time in Houston that had me craving masa, masa harina, and the unique tastes of tortillas produced from nixtamalized maize flour, not to mention the greater ease of rolling and the more rotli-like textural possibilities.

From the Nahuatl nextli (ashes) + tamali (unformed maize dough)—the treatment of grains by heating and steeping in slated lime (calcium hydroxide, Ca(OH)₂) solution, a process which changes the kernel structure, chemical composition, and nutritional value of the grain. The loosening of pericarps and the steeping in alkaline solution

• improves Vitamin B3/niacin bioavailability (wards off pellagra) and iron, improves calcium intake (as kernels absorb more calcium during the overnight steeping),
• produces more resistant starch content (you’ll ingest more fibre and less starch!),
• reduces/removes mycotoxins in the kernels themselves (Aflatoxin contamination is a known issue in maize growing regions) and
• improves color (nixtamalized maize becomes more yellow) and taste.

There are masa experts far more proficient than I, but none, dare I say, in India, where I needed to make my own masa with only local ingredients and the tools I have at home, no specialized machinery or industrial-level processing. So this, really, circling back to where I began, is my story of making masa with home-grown desi makkai, which really I should call “Indian corn,” fully intending the pun for acknowledging origins and present location at once.

My method and measures follow.

The Method in Text and Images

You need nothing more than:

• 4-5 cups or roughly 1lb/ 1/2kg of kernels, cut or pulled from shucked ears of maize.
• 1 tablespoon or one portioned bag of chunnambu (slaked lime) from the local paan-wala (by weight, 1% of the total weight of the maize kernels being used)
• 8 cups of water, or about enough to submerge the kernels and go about 2″ higher
• An hour to cook one evening, 8-12 hours to soak overnight, and time to wash and grind the next morning
• A food processor or grinder, and some patience

This is our harvest of desi makkai or Indian maize or field corn as opposed to “American sweet corn”—hard as nuts and chewy as leather.

Chunnambu or lime is readily available in India from any local paan-wala/ betel leaf seller. Elsewhere, you’d find it as pickling lime. In one paan-wala portion is about 1 heaping tablespoon, to be mixed with about 8 cups of water for 4-5 cups of corn kernels. That’s the rough-quick measure.

By weight, you want 1% of Ca(OH)₂ to the total weight of the corn. So weigh the kernels, calculate 1%, weigh that amount out in Ca(OH)₂, mix it in water and add water to cover. Keep in mind that I’m working with fresh corn here. If you are using dried corn kernels, you may need more water (and time) to cook through.

STEP 1: COOK & STEEP

Dissolve the lime in a little water, add the maize kernels, and add more water to cover and go above by about 2″ (or more, depending on the age, dryness/freshness of the kernels).

Boil the corn kernels in the slaked lime water for anywhere from 15 minutes to 1 hour, depending on how tough and dense they are (this will be determined by the variety, but also the freshness: the longer that corn has sat on a shelf, the less moisture it will inherently have and the denser it will be). In the end, you want a kernel that’s cooked through but has a solid bite to it (al dente). The pericarps should also be loosening and coming off at this stage.

Once the cooking is done, leave the pot with the cooking lime water, covered, to steep overnight.

STEP 2: RINSE & DRY

The next morning, rinse it off, very very well. Rub well as you rinse to release as many of the pericarps as possible. You don’t need to remove every single one; this is just to control a little the texture of the final dough—enough binding, but certainly less of the slaked lime taste. More pericarp content, the harder it is to grind to dough, and the more tacky the dough’s texture. No pericarp content at all, and the dough might be a little too crumbly to hold together at all. So a rough balance is best.

Change the water a number of times to make sure you wash all the lime off.

You’ll notice three things at once: the pericarps slip off easily now, the corn smells utterly delicious, and the kernels are now this deep yellow–in contrast to the fresh corn off the cob, which is paler by far. This is nixtamal or hominy by now, maize no more.

Lay out the cleaned corn to dry a bit. This is just to make sure you get as crumbly a masa as possible which clumps together nicely on kneading, and that you need only minimal additions of some older stock of masa harina/ ground corn flour to bring a dough together.

STEP 3, Option 1: MASA HARINA

If the sun is hot enough where you are, and the crows not rowdy, you can dry the nixtamal out completely and mill to flour—that’s masa harina, the flour used for tortillas, tamales and so much more.

Here is my nixamalized corn, completely dried; note how the grains look yellow, shrunken and translucent. The man at the mill noticed, too, and complained about this: cooked-and-dried grains are harder and therefore more load on his machines. It took some convincing to get him to mill my dried grains at all. But it was worth the effort for then having home-made masa harina readily on hand, for example to make Bombay Halvah on a whim.

STEP 3, Option 2: MASA DOUGH

Using a food processor, grind the nixtamal to a paste and then knead to a dough. You may need to add a little pre-made masa harina if your nixtamal is too wet, so keep some on hand, or just use a minimal amount of regular corn flour (not corn starch, but corn flour). Traditional masa grinding was, a lot like our own traditional flour grinding, done by stone—so if you have a dosa grinder that you can use after an initial spin or two in the food processor, then use that to get a final, finer texture, or to make a more crumbly masa come together in a dough ball.

You can store this fresh masa in the fridge for a few days or pinch off balls of dough and press/roll them into tortillas. Use a greased press, if you have one. It’s so much faster!

There she is, soft and fragrant and popping yellow and nutritionally vastly improved, as easy as home food processing gets.

STEP 4: TORTILLAS

After this, assuming you have tortillas in mind, the rest is about rolling skill. I find it easiest and fastest to use a lightly greased tortilla press, or to press out tortillas on a lightly greased banana leaf. If you’ve ever made jolada rotte/jau rotli/sorghum flatbreads, the process is similar though you don’t need to re-hydrate fresh masa of course and you don’t need hot water with masa harina. But once the tortillas go on the griddle, it helps to have a moist cloth around to press them and get them to puff.

Then stack, cover with a tea-towel, and allow them to soften just slightly before gobbling them up.

Of course, this isn’t by a long shot the only good use you can put your home-made masa to. There’s champurrado [about which more later, Mexican hot chocolate]; there’s pozole [masa fermented with piloncillo–jaggery by another name–and turned into a drink]; tamales, of course, empanadas, gorditas, tostadas [which feel a cross between a sajja rotte made with sorghum and a Gujarati thepla dried out into khakhra]. Beyond Mexican fare, masa can go into breads and biscuits, like El Savadoran stuffed pupusa, or even just into crusts and crumbles that complement the classic masa depth of flavor.

I’ve a chocolate tart in mind with a masa crumble for some special moment, though I might have to turn my leftover tortillas first into fried crisps to top a rich tomato tortilla soup.