Maria Rojas prepares tortillas at Pure Taqueria using a Ventura Flex tortilla maker.
Serving great tortillas is part of the success recipe for many Mexican restaurants, and the fresher they are, the better. Pure Taqueria, a six-location restaurant in Georgia, has mastered the freshness angle by making their own corn tortillas in-house.
“The biggest part of our process is that we make the tortillas fresh every single day,” says Carlos Cisnernos, Pure Taqueria's corporate chef. “We usually make about 350 per day in each location”
Pure Taqueria, which is 14 years old, has been making the tortillas in-house for about the past year.
“We had decided that we were going to have the best tortillas possible,” Cisnernos says. “We first tried making them by hand, and then with some equipment, and then we found the Ventura Flex machine.”
The Ventura Flex is a tabletop corn tortilla machine from Tortilla Master, a company based in Houston, Tex. Cisnernos says the Ventura Flex makes top-quality tortillas quickly and easily.
“We’ve had great comments about them,” he says. “They don’t break easily. Like when we make a chicken taco, which has a lot of broth, we can serve it on that tortilla and it works very well.”
Tortilla Masters entered the tortilla machine business in 2005, but the Ventura Flex has been on the market just over a year.
“Through our experience with restaurant owners, we found that there was a need for a compact corn tortilla machine,” says Leticia Alatorre, one of the company owners. “While some companies were selling compact flour tortilla presses, no one had a tabletop corn tortilla machine to fill that need.”
Alatorre says the company sold its first Ventura Flex machine to Facebook. “After watching the video on our website, their chef thought it would be a great addition to their Taco Bar restaurant, which is in the Instagram building at Facebook headquarters in Palo Alto, Calif. We are very happy to have them as our first customer.”
Pure Taqueria doesn’t have the same high profile as Facebook, but Cisneros says a seventh location is soon to open. Another advancement in the near future is that he plans to begin making the masa for his tortillas in-house.
“That’s the project for this year,” he says.