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Here's a technical question about nixtamal for HN readers. I wouldn't expect an answer in foodie forums unless Nathan Myhrvold was active: Every recipe for coo

Here's a technical question about nixtamal for HN readers. I wouldn't expect an answer in foodie forums unless Nathan Myhrvold was active: Every recipe for cooking corn into nixtamal calls for cal as a percentage of the weight of the corn, and then to cover by a certain amount with water. The specified cal is all over the map, and the amount of water corn can absorb varies. For comparison, many bread bakers can't manage to take their starter into account when calculating dough hydration. They still have an understandable number they can vary, but it's not calibrated and of less use to others. For comparison, most brine recipes calculate salt as a percentage of the water, without regard to the target protein. Even Thomas Keller's newest cookbook "The French Laundry, Per Se" notes that all fish in each restaurant passes through a 10% brine for 10 to 30 minutes. Paul Bertolli in "Cooking by Hand" advises computing the equilibrium salinity of a brine left for many hours or days. One computes a water percentage for the meat, accounting for bone weight and muscle solids, and adds salt to the brine under the assumption that the meat will reach this equilibrium salinity. Just as anyone who fears a complex recipe is ducking less dexterity work than five minutes of practice for a concert pianist, any cook who fears this calculation is ducking less conceptual work than any reader here engaged in five minutes of programming. This is a trivial spreadsheet. I could be wrong, but I'm not aware of a chemical mechanism where the cal in nixtamal all binds to the corn, ignoring the water. My nixtamal recipe is 4:1 water to corn (enough for every variety I've tried) and 0.5% cal by total weight of the water and corn. This is less than many recipes but it consistently works. If equilibrium pH is a good proxy for what happens to the cal (as CO2 levels are a good proxy for Covid exposure risk), then I should be tweaking my recipe each time, and recording the equilibrium pH. This would be a simple linear regression, leading to a percentage for corn comparable to the percentage Paul Bertolli applies to meat. I get by without knowing this percentage, because I use a fixed water to corn ratio by weight, and cal percentage is not as critical as bread dough hydration. Too little cal doesn't work; some find the taste or texture of too much cal objectionable. One also varies how completely one rinses the next day, as cal helps the tortilla texture and acts as a preservative. Does anyone here know more about this?

hundt 5y ago
This is an excellent question that I never thought of! My guess is that - there is a large range of cal concentrations that work fine without tasting bad, and - the amount of water absorbed by the corn is very hard to predict, as it varies from batch to batch, and - unlike brining meat, it is unlikely that two people doing this by hand would vary how much water they are adding by 5x or even 3x, because there is no reason to add a lot more water than is needed, and - recipes are simpler if you base the cal amount on the corn amount and then add "enough water" (which may change once you start cooking). So maybe no one doing it for non-industrial audiences has bothered narrowing it down. I use around half as much as you (3:1 water to corn and 1% cal by weight of corn) and it works well for me.

hundt 5y ago

This is an excellent question that I never thought of! My guess is that - there is a large range of cal concentrations that work fine without tasting bad, and - the amount of water absorbed by the corn is very hard to predict, as it varies from batch to batch, and - unlike brining meat, it is unlikely that two people doing this by hand would vary how much water they are adding by 5x or even 3x, because there is no reason to add a lot more water than is needed, and - recipes are simpler if you base the cal amount on the corn amount and then add "enough water" (which may change once you start cooking). So maybe no one doing it for non-industrial audiences has bothered narrowing it down. I use around half as much as you (3:1 water to corn and 1% cal by weight of corn) and it works well for me.