I’ve been fascinated with corn for a long time and it’s taken me years to collect the information I always felt I needed to learn how to make it a staple part of my diet. I’ve found some excellent books and recipes.

Firstly you’ll probably need a corn grinder. We import them especially for all you corn officionadoes who are keen to learn to make tortillas, cornmeal and posole. We use our corn grinder every morning to grind our Essene Flax seed and pumpkin seeds that we eat with our breakfast, as well as all our dry or wet corn processing. You also need to know that traditionally corn was always cooked with woodash, or lime. This changes the nutrional qualities of the corn and in fact means that a complete range of amino acids is available.

POSOLE

Posole is basically any kind of dried corn that has been soaked for 24 hours with woodash ( 1 heaped tablespoon of clean woodash per cup of dried corn) and then slowly cooked until the corn is burst right open and fluffy like pop corn, at which point it can be rinsed and used in soup etc, or ground to make tortillas or porridge etc.

Kaanga Ma seed after soaking in wood ash water

CORNMEAL PORRIDGE

Cornmeal Porridge can be made in many ways, two of the most common are:

• Grind your dried corn ( flour corn) and lightly toast it in a pan. Boil water  (3 cups water 1 cup cornmeal) and add the roasted cornmeal whilst whisking it until it begins to thicken. Continue stirring until the porridge is very thick and comes away from the sides of the pot. Serve with dried fruit, honey, ground flax seed and pumpkin seed and yoghurt!
• A variation on the theme which is a healthier option is to soak the corn meal in a strained wood ash solution overnight, strain and then add to your boiling water in the morning while whisking fast.

TORTILLAS

Tortillas are made by making posole first then grinding posole into a bowl. This is called wet grinding because the mixture will be moist. This paste is then moistened a little more by adding water if needed then forming into balls and flattening. I have a mexican flattener ( don’t know what it’s called?) but you can put a banana leaf on a board, put the ball of paste on the leaf, add another leaf and squash with another board and push to flatten. Remove the top leaf, lift up using the second leaf and put onto a hot stove top ( woodstove) or onto a gas heated metal plate. It needs to be very hot, the tortillas cook fast and they can be turned over and finished on the other side.