By Ed Avis
Masa is an essential ingredient in countless Mexican and Latin dishes, so it stands to reason that great masa is a key to great Mexican cuisine. The owners of Session Taco in St. Louis, Missouri recognized that when they opened their restaurant — then called Mission Taco — in 2013.
When co-owner Jason Tilford and his team couldn’t find a local masa supplier, they hit the road to learn the art of making masa from scratch.
“Me and my colleagues traveled all over the country, literally,” he says. “We visited places in LA, San Francisco, Chicago, and down in Texas. We just asked a lot of questions and learned that ultimately as intimidating as it seems, it's not really that hard. There are just a few components that go into it. As long as you're hitting those, you should be good.”
Two years after they’d opened their restaurant, they were making their own masa.
Today, Session Taco operates six locations in St. Louis and one in Kansas City, all featuring tortillas made with scratch-made masa.
“The thing we liked about it from the beginning is we could make our tortillas as thick as we wanted, so we didn't have to use two tortillas for a taco, so we made them a little thicker,” Tilford says. “And we just liked having the flexibility of making our own, having the freshness of the corn with no preservatives and all that stuff.”
Sessions Taco uses scratch-made masa for tortillas and chips.
From Hand Presses to Automated Line
Masa is the raw material of many Mexican/Latin dishes. Tortillas are the primary product made with masa, but it also is used in tamales, sopes, huaraches and countless other dishes.
Tortillas can be made with masa using rather elementary equipment. In many restaurants, a kitchen worker uses a simple hinged, wooden tortilla press to turn individual balls of masa into discs, then cooks them on a flattop or griddle to make the tortilla. That’s a rather laborious process but works well if the quantity of tortillas needed is not too great.
When Tilford and his colleagues began making tortillas, they used a hand-crank tortilla machine, which is somewhat more efficient than the hinged wooden press, but still pretty elementary.
“But it became cumbersome and took up a lot of space,” he explains.
The solution: They bought a used, basic, industrial-size tortilla-making line and housed it in a nearby commissary where they nixtamalized corn and made fresh tortillas. That proved a big time- and labor-saving step since the business had grown and they were supplying multiple locations.
The new equipment worked well, but Tilford knew a more sophisticated tortilla line would work even better.
In 2020, when the company opened a new location in a former brew pub in Kirkwood, Missouri, the brewing equipment was replaced with a state-of-the-art automated tortilla line from equipment supplier Casa Herrera.
“The one we had before was real basic, made in Mexico, and it didn’t have any computers, any timing or anything like that. You turned it on, and it went,” Tilford recalls. “This one now has settings and adjustments. You enter the codes and all that stuff, and it automatically sets it to where you want it.”
The tortilla line at Session Taco's location in Kirkwood, Missouri
It is the same line that four employees use today to make tortillas (up to 9,000 to 10,000 per hour!) for the Kirkwood restaurant and the five other Session Tacos in and around St. Louis. (The tortillas went to the Kansas City location, too, until Tilford started sourcing from Yoli Tortilla, a high-quality Kansas City tortilleria.)
Another advantage is that the new equipment can create very thin tortillas, which allows Session Taco to make their own tortilla chips — something each location has offered since 2020.
Today the tortilla line is not just a part of the business, it’s also an attraction. The space where the brewing equipment was previously located had large windows into the dining room, so Casa Herrera created a U-turn cooling ramp, which they had never done before, so guests can see the tortilla-making in action.
Return to Roots
Tilford says the company is soon opening a new modern Mexican restaurant called La Pez in Kansas City, Missouri. That restaurant will feature more entrees and fewer tacos, so the need for tortillas may be less. But they will still need masa for other dishes.
“There's a chance that we get a small grinder and do it in-house again,” he says. “We're not focused on that yet, but probably come to the new year, we’ll sit back and assess whether we should do it in that location or not. There’s plenty of space. The kitchen is big and we know we have the knowhow now.”
Sidebar: The Masa-Making Process
Making masa from scratch starts with corn. Session Taco buys corn from Rovey Grain, a corn supplier for restaurants and larger operations that make masa. Session Taco uses a combination of white and yellow corn, which comes in 50-lb bags. They make one batch of masa, which takes 800 to 900 pounds of corn, each day of the week except Sunday.
Nixtamalizing the corn —a process that softens the hard outer hull of the corn kernels, allowing them to be ground — is the first step. The raw corn is poured into a cauldron with water and slaked lime (calcium hydroxide, the alkali agent that softens the hull). The cauldron is heated from below with a gas fire and the mixture is boiled for less than an hour, then allowed to steep overnight.
The amount of heat applied, the quantity of lime added, and even the exterior temperature and humidity all play a role in how the nixtamalization plays out, Tilford explains.
“It was a lot of trial and error,” he says of the early days. “But at the end of the day you realize it’s not really that hard. It’s a little technical, but once you know what temperature you’ve got to get it to and how long it can rest after that, it’s pretty much same thing in and out every day.”
Next the nixtamalized corn is rinsed to purify it for grinding.
“You’re rinsing off that outer thing on the kernel and it turns bright yellow,” Tilford explains. “The less you rinse it, the more yellow and limey tasting your tortilla’s going to be, so the more you rinse it, the less yellow the tortilla’s going to be. You keep spraying it with water and draining it as much as you want; that’s how you control the color of the tortilla and the flavor.”
The rinsed corn is then fed into an augur that carries it to the top of the grinding machine. More water can be added at that point if needed. The grinder then converts the corn kernels into masa.
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