Puerta Vallarta Tortilla Factory

While in Puerto Vallarta we chose to go on a Mexican Cooking excursion. About a dozen of us from the cruise ship boarded a beautiful air conditioned bus to venture out into the countryside. Our tour guide, named Santa, narrated while rolling down the road pointing out historical areas and facts about Puerto Vallarta. She spoke English very well, was a great tour guide, and was quite proud of her Mexican heritage.

After we got out of the "city" we enjoyed riding through little villages dotted alongside the dirt roads, and couldn't help noticing the various vendors selling their wares. We saw fresh mangoes and papayas on a fruit stand, peppers and onions on another stand, barbecued chickens being prepared for the lunch hour, and then we actually stopped to visit a local "tortillaria" or tortilla factory where we got to watch tortillas being made from scratch.

It all starts with the field corn—

The corn is soaked in water which has lime added to it.

Santa is explaining why they use lime in the soaking water. The lime treatment loosens the hulls from the kernels and softens the corn. In addition, the lime reacts with the corn so that the nutrient niacin can be assimilated by the digestive tract.

The soaked kernels are allowed to dry and then ground into a fine flour, called masa harina (which literally translates to "dough flour." It is much finer than corn meal. The flour is put into this hopper and only water is mixed in making a beautiful soft dough.

The dough is plopped into this vertical mixer and mixed until the consistency is perfect to be rolled into tortillas. That's it . . . just water and masa harina!

I wasn't able to see where the dough was formed into balls, but this shows the tortillas being baked on both sides.

They come out on a conveyor belt from baking machine, hot and ready to stack up. We were each invited to walk up to the conveyor belt and sample a delicious, very warm, tortilla-made-from-scratch—yummo!

This little girl walked up to the counter, bringing her container from home, and bought a kilogram (just over two pounds) of tortillas. According to the sign it cost her less than one U.S. dollar. What a fun stop!

We extended our gratitude to the workers in the tortillaria who stopped their production so that we could see how tortillas were made, hopped back onto the bus, and traveled to our final destination to learn to cook authentic Mexican cuisine (which I'll tell you about tomorrow).

Life is good!