These farm-to-table tortillas are made in the back of a bar
Ossington Ave.’s Maizal not only makes tortillas from scratch, it grows its own corn
As the sun rises above the restaurant and bar-laiden stretch of Ossington Avenue, sounds of whirring from an automatic stone grinder and a tortilla press are coming from the back of the closed Baby Huey bar.
The trio from Maizal is hard at work, fulfilling orders for about 60 kilograms of fresh corn tortillas for Kensington Market restaurants Seven Lives and El Rey. It’s a small order on this particular day — patio season is over and indoor dining is shut down once again.
For the past four years, the unused kitchen of the late night bar has been churning out tortillas made from Ontario-grown corn, supplying restaurants in the province and, increasingly, home cooks.
“With the pandemic, the supply chain has changed and I know a lot of restaurants that had trouble with shipments so they came to us,” says Maizal founder Iván Wadgymar, who also plants and grows some of the corn he uses on an one-acre plot at Cavaleiro Farm, in Schomberg, outside of King City. “Our supply chain is shorter. One time, one of the farmers we work with in Ottawa could only get her corn halfway to Belleville so we had to get a truck to get it.”
An untrained palate might dismiss the tortilla as a mere vehicle for carnitas or nopales. But until you’ve eaten a tortilla that’s been made minutes after the corn has been ground, mixed, pressed and baked, you’re missing out.
When eaten the day they’re made, tortillas have a natural elasticity and a richly nutty, almost popcorn like flavour. The dried kernels (a mix of white and yellow dent corn this time) is soaked overnight in an alkaline solution (an ancient process called nixtamalization) before being ground by stone into a masa and fed into a machine that presses and cooks individual tortillas.
If eating the tortillas the day after, moisten the edges before heating them up in a hot pan for 15 seconds each side. After that, the tortillas are best frozen or else they can get mouldy since there are no preservatives.
Customers order tortillas through Maizal’s site, where they can also buy beans that Wadgymar grows when corn isn’t on the field (a practice known as crop rotation which reintroduce nutrients back into the soil), ready-to-steam tamales made with the same corn (husk and all) and the chili-peanut condiment salsa macha that goes on everything. Locals are encouraged to pick up their orders at the bar, where the tortillas are wrapped in paper in an effort to avoid using plastic (not all that different from picking up a loaf from the local bakery).
Wadgymar, a former landscaper, developed an interest in farming and environmental studies before he started growing corn in 2009. In 2012, he opened Maizal (named after the Spanish word for cornfield) as a restaurant in Liberty Village, serving quesadillas and tacos using tortillas made from Ontario corn grown on small-scale farms.
The restaurant closed at the end of 2020 so Wadgymar could focus on the tortilla business as more people stayed home to cook. Another bonus: The hours are, in his book, more forgiving.
“I was leaving the restaurant at 10 at night. Here, I’ll be done at three, four, maybe six on a busy day,” he notes. “Now I get to see the sun set.”
In the past six years, he’s upgraded from pressing the masa by hand to using an automatic press to keep up with the orders. In addition to the farm where he works, he also gets corn from small-scale farmers in the Ottawa Valley, Northumberland County and Norfolk County.
“I want to use locally grown crown from heritage seeds,” says Wadgymar, showing off an ear of dried blue-and-purple corn he plans on growing this year (his dark blue tortillas were a hit earlier in the fall).
He likes the idea of having a “connection” to the tortilla when he sees someone east it. There’s something special about understanding “the work that went in growing the corn and how the seeds developed.”
Plus, there’s an underpinning of resistance in keeping up the tradition of small-scale tortilla making — something that’s survived thousands of years.
“A tortilla is a preserved relic, an Indigenous act and a sign our ancestors’ traditions weren’t wiped out and assimilation didn’t happen.”