Passover-Kosher Corn Tortillas

April 3rd, 2013
ideas, passover
During Passover you're not supposed to eat food where wheat has been wet for more than eighteen minutes. Such foods are chametz, but if you're Ashkenazi you're also not supposed to eat kitniyot, which expands the prohibited category to include all sorts of vaguely wheat like things such as rice, corn, lentils, and peas. There are various reasons for why you shouldn't eat them: they look like wheat products so someone might mix them up, they could have been stored in sacks previously used for flour, crop rotation might mean some wheat grew on a field mostly growing other things, but they all come down to the idea that to be on the safe side you should treat these foods as if they might be wheat.

Ok then, let's treat corn with all the care we would apply to wheat and make corn tortillas rapidly with minimal water-corn sitting time. You lose nixtamalization, but for one week a year that's not going to cause deficiencies. You'd need to process your own whole corn under rabbinical supervision, but this should be doable. I wonder how big a market of Ashkenazim there is for tortillas?

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