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Mexico's heirloom corn strains are resurging amid more demand
- zwieback 3y agoHas anyone grown heirloom varieties in their home garden and is it worthwhile, e.g. does it taste good or is it more for the nostalgia factor?
- derethanhausen 3y agoI think there’s also a variety factor, heirlooms are usually very unique and fun-looking. But yes I think taste is generally good too. I’m growing heirloom Zucchini and Tomatoes this year. The tomato flavor certainly isn’t bad, about on par with other good garden tomatoes. The zucchini on the other hand is out of this world good, and retains the flavor even when the fruits are large, unusual for most other Zuccs. (Variety is Costata Romanesco)
- civilitty 3y agoIt depends on what you're looking for. You'll struggle to grow something as sweet as store bought sweetcorn but you can easily grow corn with deeper and richer flavor at home. Just make sure to select a variety meant for direct human consumption and not animal feed or ethanol (some are for human consumption but only once processed). US industrialized food is almost universally bland and tasteless compared to home grown because they're picked too early and bred for aesthetics and transport - it's an issue every immigrant I know struggles with. On top of that, there are dozens if not hundreds of different varieties that haven't been commercialized for every fruit or vegetable in the grocery store so there's a whole world of flavors and textures that most people haven't experienced.
- seiferteric 3y agoCurrently have painted mountain, glass gem and then regular sweet corn. The painted mountain colors are really neat and it is okay to eat, but a firmer and not as sweet (obviously) as the sweet corn. The glass gem corn is not ready yet, but I hear it is good for popcorn so I will try that.
- bluGill 3y agoCorn is a hot season grass: it likes growing in large fields with lots of other corn plans near it. Most home gardens are not large enough to grow good corn (you can grow it, but the corn will not do as well - this can still be good enough.) With sweet corn time from field table is critical to good flavor, so people do grow it in their garden anyway, but it would be better to live next door to a large corn farm that you get it from.
- Scoundreller 3y agoDoes it like having actual corn around it, or just lots of "stuff" around it to trap in heat that a fenced/walled area could serve as a substitute for? (obvs problem is that the fence doesn't grow with it...)
- bluGill 3y agoGood question, but I don't know. I'd guessing lots of other warm season grasses which need not be corn. Most gardens grow many things that are not warm season grass. That is plants that don't grow very tall.
- civilitty 3y agoCorn is wind pollinated and having a lot of plants around decreases the chance of self-pollination and increases the chance of outbreeding enhancement.
- Rustwerks 3y agoCorn will not pollinate correctly if it is not in a rather dense clump. If you grow it in your garden you should plant 3 or more rows(or a square/circle). Otherwise you will get mostly empty cobs.
- MostlyStable 3y ago3 rows is not nearly enough. I grow corn, and even with 9 rows, 20' each (roughly a 20'x20' square, with nearly 200 plants), I still hand polinate (takes about 5-10 minutes every 2-3 days once you start seeing silk). I doubt that most home growers will get anywhere close to enough density for good wind pollination, but hand pollination is not that hard.
- reydequeso 3y agoI think they taste better than the grocery store varieties but usually it is more difficult growing them, and they have a lower yield than industrial varieties. There are also general quirks with growing them. Experience lends me to suggest that heirlooms are more immediately sensitive to the environment that convention varieties. Buying from baker creek who are out in the Midwest, Seeds are going to have a different response in the growing in the SE Atlantic region, that response seems more pronounced although I have no idea of how to quantify it. Ultimately I think it is worth it, it is fun, and it taps into more of the holistic aspects of gardening. For example, learning how to make quesadillas because your heirloom corn gets infected with corn smut, so instead of an infection you have a product. That kind of frame-shift i think goes into the nostalgia of Doing It How We Used To.
- jimnotgym 3y agoOne huge benefit is that you can keep your own seed to grow next year. Hybrid seeds usually do not come true to type if kept. Commercial varieties also often have some kind of IP restriction which makes it illegal to grow from seed you kept.
- bluGill 3y agoCommercial varieties don't normally have the IP restrictions. A few do, but most don't. However hybrids don't breed true so only a fool would save seeds. Non-hybrids breed true, but generally don't yield as well so there is a lot less profit in them (though sometimes there is more if that variety is in demand it)
- sendfoods 3y agoTo my knowledge, zwieback is made from wheat, not corn. /s
- zwieback 3y agoYou are correct! Otherwise it would be more like a baked Tostito
- Obi_Juan_Kenobi 3y agoMost people grow sweet corn in their gardens, so they won't be growing these. There are heirloom sweet corn varieties, but they have to be cooked in minutes/hours from harvesting to remain sweet. As far as the starchy corn, you won't get a lot of flavor difference.
- blovescoffee 3y agoThere is flavor difference in the starchy corns as well as texture difference! Obviously they all taste like corn but there's certainly variation.
- estatico 3y agoHeirloom corn is not necessarily better or tastier. The natives planted different kinds and they each had different resistance to different issues, i.e. drought, soil, elevation. They were diversifying their crops in case something wiped out one of them they had other options.
- mistrial9 3y agonative people in that area had a special relationship to corn for centuries before the arrival of the West. Short story is that corn was an early "science" target for genetically modified strains. A rough analogy to the conflict might be "vegetarian civilization considers cows sacred for centuries; new rulers decide cattle branding and breeding control are just commerce" .. something like that.. there is an emotional and cultural relationship to food, and long term residency in a place, that does not show up in commerce.
- kykeonaut 3y agoYou can see evidence of this genetic experimentation with crops in Moray, a set of terraces built at different altitude levels created by the Inca culture in the Andes mountains [0]. It is believed that the Incas would acclimatize crops to the high elevations of the Andes mountains in these terraces. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moray_(Inca_ruin) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moray_(Inca_ruin)
- pessimizer 3y agoWhat choice do they have? The US subsidizes corn massively, and dumps it tariff-free into Mexico. This is like micro-brews, but corn.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- ClumsyPilot 3y agoUS also pushes biofuel from Corn, which causes more CO2 than simply burning oil: https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/us-corn-based-ethanol-worse-climate-than-gasoline-study-finds-2022-02-14/ https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/us-corn-based-e...
- mrguyorama 3y agoThe point of ethanol in gasoline is to replace roughly 15% of the oil we consume with not-oil that we make here (because 30% of our entire imports were saudi oil for decades) for energy independence, to have another way to subsidize people in Iowa, and to replace MTBE as an octane booster because it kept leaching out of ground storage tanks and poisoning innocent people. Ethanol pisses a lot of people off for various reasons but it's an extremely safe octane booster compared to our previous substances, keeps american energy less dependent on a war mongering desert country, and is yet another way to funnel tax dollars to a few big corn conglomerates. Even if the only thing ethanol in gasoline did was increase octane, it's such a big improvement in safety compared to MTBE that it would still be a success. If you think early 2000s america gave a fuck about carbon emissions when the current administration was literally an oil baron, IDK what to tell you.
- ClumsyPilot 3y agoWell thats fine, but i take issue with false marketing
- miguelazo 3y agoThe US massively subsidizes corn, AND as part of NAFTA got President Salinas to legalize privatization of the ejidos. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ejido https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ejido
- elsonrodriguez 3y agoThere was a corn variety that was semi-recently discovered to have a symbiotic relationship with bacteria which provides nitrogen to the corn plant, thus eliminating the need to use nitrogen fertilizer. It's currently in development to be commercialized, and I'm sure some geneticists are already trying to splice other crops to gain the same ability. There is a rich diversity of crops around the world that need examination, you never know what you'll find.
- sendfoods 3y agoBBC did a pretty good video [0] about it. Haven't really heard much about it since. Must be extremely exciting for scientists, as (to my understanding) this kind of self-fertilization is completely unheard of! [0] https://youtube.com/watch?v=CFyd-kC6IUw https://youtube.com/watch?v=CFyd-kC6IUw
- zdragnar 3y ago> this kind of self-fertilization is completely unheard of! How is this different from other nitrogen-fixing species that are already known? Some olives, plenty of legumes such as soy beans, clover and alfalfa all have symbiotic relationships with bacteria for this.
- seunosewa 3y agoAnd you still have to fertilise them with complementary nutrients and also nitrogen for the best yields.
- RajT88 3y ago> How is this different from other nitrogen-fixing species that are already known? It does it in a radically different way - pulling bacteria up from the soil into weird drippy goo from roots dangling midair. The video and various articles aren't totally clear on this point, but it suggests it can pull a lot more nitrogen out of the air than other known nitrogen fixing plants (which keep the bacteria underground on their roots).
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- acadapter 3y agoI wish that the "nixtamal" precooked form of corn would be more widely available in Europe. It really is a superior product compared to plain corn flour - I didn't really like most corn-based dishes before I tried it.
- kykeonaut 3y agoI literally just bought some nixtamal online the other day, I wish there were more shops that carried it. More interestingly, I was extremely surprised to discover that nixtamal is completely absent in South America, despite the high consumption of corn products. I lived in Peru for a time, and buying nixtamal was impossible, not one vendor, physical or online, carried it.
- ingenieros 3y agoThe process is not completely absent in South America, it's just named differently. In Colombia for example it is referred to as maíz "pelado" and in Venezuela it is spelled slightly different "pelao" but the process is identical to what Mexicans call nixtamal.
- sendfoods 3y agoNot sure where you are based, but recently found these german farmers [0] that use local corn with imported machinery for their products. They also sell fresh masa (which, I guess, you are referring to?) as opposed to already pressed tortillas. [0] https://www.tlaxcalli.de/ https://www.tlaxcalli.de/
- onli 3y agoThank you! I had no idea this existed in Germany, and I know some people who will be very happy because of this discovery.
- sendfoods 3y agoThat makes me unreasonably happy to hear! I really miss good mexican and latin food in mainland Europe. Of all places I could think of spreading the word HN was definitely the last place :D
- returningfory2 3y agoThe article indirectly references the company Masienda (https://masienda.com https://masienda.com). A lot of the restaurants in the US using heirloom corn (including every restaurant in the article) are getting it in part through Masienda. But Masienda also sell masa direct to consumer and I highly recommend it!
- beepbooptheory 3y agoThis looks great. Even using regular ole Maseca, the jump in quality is huge compared to plain store bought.
- Syzygies 3y agoFor a parallel effort to save heirloom beans, see Rancho Gordo. They sell online and in stores; their bean club sometimes has an 11,000 place waitlist. https://www.ranchogordo.com/ https://www.ranchogordo.com/ Yes, Masienda rocks, and making one's own masa from homemade nixtamal is extraordinary. Many of us learned the idea of using an Indian wet grinder from "Oaxaca: Home Cooking from the Heart of Mexico", where Bricia Lopez recommends the Premier Small Wonder Table Top Wet Grinder that I have used for years. It takes 40 minutes of scraping every now and then, adding water to yield a too-wet masa one dries with a bit of masa harina. A dramatic improvement comes by instead using a chocolate refiner based on the same unit, with custom hardware. My favorite hardware store puzzle: Who else has my problem? Home chocolate makers are famously particular. https://www.melangers.com/products/premier-chocolate-refiner-8-lbs-with-stainless-steel-stone-holder https://www.melangers.com/products/premier-chocolate-refiner... Masienda sells a tabletop "Molinito" masa grinder. I've eaten tortillas at a restaurant that uses this grinder, and I was not impressed. It could be that they chose a coarser texture to impress on their customers that this was artisan food! However, the original method of hand grinding masa took time. An Indian wet grinder more closely replicates this process than any "one and done" mill.
- reaperman 3y agoOtherwise typical midwestern kid, for some reason I've always hated beans - especially refried beans but also black beans, pinto beans, etc. Rancho Gordo beans are transformatively good - I absolutely love them as long as they're not criminally overcooked. I still hate other normal beans from the supermarkets. They're really THAT good. Highly recommend them to anyone.
- neves 3y agoOne of the best things of traveling to Peru is to taste their enormous variety of corn and potatoes. We see how bland our diet really is.
- icouldntresist 3y agoThis gives me hope! I was reading some of Dianna Kennedy's ("The Julia Child of Mexico") books and she goes into some detail of the loss of heirloom varieties of different crops in Mexico due to cheap imports. The peppers were especially affected; the local Mexican industry was inundated by imports from China, which were often not even the pepper which it was advertised to be. This had a severe impact on the local pepper production, many of which depended on local microclimates for cultivation and are not available outside that particular region of Mexico.
- MichaelZuo 3y agoThey are absolutely being grown in greenhouses of various agricultural research centres around the world. For mass market commercial production, probably not.
- AlbertCory 3y agoThis reminds me: I'm currently reading "At Home" (Bill Bryson), and he says that the mystery of how ancient peoples managed to turn teosinte into something worth growing and eating. The scholarly research, e.g. [1] seems to be about maize spread, which is interesting, but it begs the question of how and why they made it into maize in the first place. Even more amusing, he says there was a conference at the Univ. of Illinois in 1969 on this, and it was so contentious (even getting personal at times) that no papers resulted. [1] https://archive.ph/Ub586 https://archive.ph/Ub586
- tomcam 3y agoA friend of mine was one hit in the crossfire of a maize conference and was never the same. Oddly he was there for a separate echidnae con but the maize folks just… jumped to conclusions and did what maize people do. For years after that, he talked only of Chapalote alleles. Eventually, he made it back to the duck billed platypus, a much diminished man.
- AlbertCory 3y agoI guess there are at least two competing narratives? What are they? Somehow, it had to be selective breeding, since what other explanation is there? But WHY people did it, and what motivated them -- I don't know what evidence there could be. ChatGPT tell us: ====== The transformation of teosinte into maize (corn) is considered one of the most significant achievements in agricultural history. Mesoamericans, the indigenous peoples of present-day Mexico and Central America, were responsible for this domestication process, which occurred over thousands of years. This transformation involved careful selection and cultivation of teosinte plants with desirable traits, leading to the development of the maize we know today. Here are the key steps involved in how Mesoamericans turned teosinte into maize: Observation and Gathering: Mesoamerican communities initially observed wild teosinte plants growing in their natural habitats. Teosinte is a wild grass with small, tough kernels. Over time, they realized that some teosinte plants had slightly larger and more accessible kernels, which could potentially be useful for food. Selective Harvesting: They started to selectively harvest teosinte plants with the most desirable traits, such as larger seeds or fewer hard outer coverings. By saving and replanting the seeds from these chosen plants, they promoted the propagation of desired characteristics in the next generation. Controlled Planting: Mesoamericans began to cultivate teosinte near their settlements, providing a controlled environment for its growth. This controlled planting allowed them to have more influence over the breeding and development of teosinte plants with preferred traits. Repeated Selection and Domestication: Over generations, Mesoamericans continued to save seeds from the teosinte plants that exhibited the most favorable traits. Gradually, the teosinte plants underwent a process of domestication, with their characteristics evolving to become more like those of modern maize. Artificial Selection: The process of domestication also involved artificial selection, where humans intentionally chose plants with specific features and bred them together to enhance those traits in the next generation. Increasing Yield: As the domestication process progressed, the size and yield of the maize cobs increased, and the seeds became more substantial and easier to process as a food source. Cultural Significance: Maize became deeply ingrained in the culture and traditions of Mesoamerican societies. It played a crucial role in their diets and rituals and became a staple crop in their agricultural practices. This process of gradual domestication led to the transformation of teosinte into maize, creating a crop that was much more productive and nutritious for Mesoamerican communities. It's essential to note that this domestication was a result of generations of careful observation, selection, and cultivation by the indigenous people of the region, showcasing their knowledge and understanding of plant genetics and agriculture. ==== Honestly, I'd like to hear what's controversial about this.
- diob 3y agoInteresting, I just met a group starting a co-op around heirloom varieties of plants etc. and promoting them / selling food products made from them.
- nathancahill 3y agoIf you want to try some (in the US), I highly recommend Masienda: https://masienda.com https://masienda.com. Expensive but flavorful.
- azinman2 3y agoIt's not really that expensive. Is it more than masaca? Yes but not fabulously so. You can still make well over 20 tortillas on a bag for $10?