Welcome to ¡Ask a Tortilla Expert!, the world's premier column on all things tortilla! Each week until the finals of the 2023 Tortilla Tournament on October 8, judge Gustavo Arellano will take your most burning (but never burnt) tortilla questions. Grab your butter and salsa macha because things are about to get caliente.
What's the most famous tortilla ever?
This one's easy: It's the flour tortilla that Maria Rubio made for breakfast in 1977 in Lake Arthur, New Mexico, that featured a burn spot that appeared to her as an image of Jesus. Yes, I'm talking about THE original Jesus-on-a-tortilla tortilla. For decades, pilgrims from across the world descended upon the Rubio household to see the holy tortilla shard for themselves. The story drew international attention, then turned into general News of the Weird fodder until it became a punchline and then a cottage industry. There have been images of Jesus on a grilled cheese sandwich, the Virgin Mary on a freeway overpass, and many other imitators ever since. The official word for seeing images in something, by the way, is pareidolia — bring it, Wordle!
But while we all laughed, the Rubio family had to deal with the aftermath of the attention. In 2019, I commissioned Maria's daughter, Angelica Rubio, to write a beautiful essay for Eater about growing up as the daughter of the woman who found Jesus on a tortilla. Today, she's a Democratic state representative in the Land of Enchantment. Read her essay, and think about why we're wrong to laugh at Jesus-on-a-tortilla stories.
That's why I hope the famous tortilla that supplants the Rubio one is the flour tortilla that José M. Hernández ate in outer space. It's an anecdote that starts my 2012 book, Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America, and I hope the scene gets reenacted in A Million Miles Away, a film about Hernández's life starring Michael Peña. It premieres on Amazon Prime today. This tortilla is science, perseverance, migration, and more. May this cosmic tortilla be the Kubrickian Star Child that unites humanity once and for all!
Store-bought corn tortillas are so flat and lifeless while freshly made corn tortillas are fluffy and sensuous. Why do the store-bought ones differ?
"Sensuous?" Hey, this is a family station. Take that boudoir talk somewhere else! Public radio jokes aside, the answer is in your question. Anything made fresh will be, well, fresh. Anything bought from a store (or restaurant) that has sat on the shelf even for a couple of hours won't. We need to get over the cult of freshly made in determining a tortilla's merits.
As I've written before, what good is a handmade tortilla if it uses inferior products, like Maseca masa, or preservatives and a prescription label's worth of additives? Meanwhile, the only #TortillaTournament winner that was truly freshly made was 2019 winner Taco María. The rest make them, then keep them warm and sell in packages throughout the day. They're winners for a reason. While the lot of restaurants that boast that their tortillas are hechas de mano aren't — superior ingredients always are better. Just ask Jesus on a tortilla.
Got a fluffy tortilla question? Ask the Tortilla Expert at mexicanwithglasses@gmail.com. The more obscure, the better!