After years of carting tortillas home from trips to visit family in Mexico, Perla Ruiz and her husband Roman Javier solved their own problem and filled a gaping hole in the city’s Mexican food scene when they opened Milpa Masa, selling small-batch, organic corn tortillas made from scratch.
Previously, local companies made tortillas from dried corn flour and a few restaurants nixtamalized their own corn in tiny batches, but nobody sold freshly nixtamalized organic corn masa (dough) nor anything made from it until Perla Ruiz and Roman Javier opened the doors of their squat brick West Seattle building this spring and started selling their fresh tortillas.
Selling directly to consumers out of the front of their production facility each Saturday – and now Sunday – from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. was not part of the couple’s original plan. But with many restaurants closed or cutting costs in the pandemic, they pivoted – the latest change of plans in a six-year journey that highlights why nobody has started such a business before.
Small storefronts all over Mexico and around the Mexican diaspora churn out fresh, warm tortillas every day, a staple of most Mexican meals. But pioneering such a business in Seattle, Ruiz and Javier learned, meant navigating endless challenges including dragging a 175-pound corn mill across the border, skirting Trump’s steel import restrictions, and designing wastewater mitigation plans. All just to open a business that had been a compromise in the first place.
Milpa Masa
Courtesy of Naomi TomkyRuiz, who grew up in Tijuana and moved to Seattle for a job at the Mexican Consulate (where she met Javier), wanted to open a brewery. She wrote her college thesis on craft beer in Mexico, long before there was much of it, and became certified as a cicerone. Her husband, a passionate cook, wanted to open a restaurant. In 2015, burned out at their respective jobs – his in the tech industry, hers as a credit manager for a lumber company – they decided to use their savings to quit and start their own business. But with only enough savings for a single company, they reasoned that instead of one working for the other’s dream, they would meet somewhere in the middle.
The buckets full of soaking corn and the shining stainless-steel machines that mill, knead, press and cook it resemble the workings of Ruiz’s brewery, while the final product – fresh, warm, pliable blue and yellow corn tortillas – fit with Javier’s food focus. And they both saw the lack of fresh tortillas in Seattle as a critical issue – though Filipino himself, Javier grew up eating fresh tortillas in Los Angeles.
For two years, they climbed the steep learning curve of perfecting their product, feeding their friends and neighbors endless test batches. They started out using a little hand-cranked corn mill. When they upgraded, they drove back from Mexico with a 175-pound stone grinder in the back of their car. Now, they use that for home testing and have a large-scale version at the shop. But getting the commercial one proved its own challenge: Trump’s trade policies, particularly around steel, made importing the mill they planned to buy in 2018 nearly impossible. They changed course and eventually put a deposit on a California-made model – only to run into delays on delivery when COVID hit.
Milpa Masa
Courtesy of Naomi TomkyAt the same time they sourced machinery and hand-cranked hundreds of tortillas to hone their process, they struggled to find a location for their shop. In December 2019, after a year of searching, they finally leased the former catering facility just off 35th Ave. S.W. The equipment eventually arrived in the summer of 2020, its shiny metal exterior belying the simple, traditional stones within that do the actual milling. Next to it, a large mixer kneads the milled corn into dough before it moves to the next enormous machine, which rolls the dough and cuts it into tortillas before sending it down a conveyor belt on which it cooks. With all this in place, they could begin negotiating the permitting process with the county and receive approval from the department of agriculture, a necessary step with challenges unique to tortilla making.
Before the corn gets milled into dough, it must go through a process called nixtamalization. Javier and Ruiz cook and soak the corn in a mixture of water and lime – the mineral, not the fruit – before grinding it. That makes their discarded water heavily alkaline and in need of special dispensation and treatment. At the end of the ten months it took to receive the permits, Ruiz and Javier finally had everything in place: space, equipment, training, and licenses. But Washington was deep in the brutal fall wave of the pandemic and their prime planned customers, restaurants, were short on cash and closed to indoor dining for the foreseeable future.
Ruiz’s family in Mexico marveled at how long it took them to open a business so common there. “It should be so easy,” they said, asking endlessly why they weren’t open yet. “If we were in Mexico,” Javier says, “we would have been open two years ago.”
Instead, money ran low, and Javier considered returning to tech temporarily to buoy their resources – something he had already done once as they tried to launch. They did not qualify for any of the pandemic resources for businesses – the PPP and various grants – because they were a new business. They couldn’t sell at farmers markets, a fertile ground for customers interested in their type of organic, small-batch product, because nobody grew enough of the right type of corn nearby, so their tortillas didn’t fit the requirement that 70% of ingredients must be local.
They currently use corn from the Midwest, but work with Viva Farms, a local non-profit that trains aspiring and limited-resource farmers, on some micro-batches of tortillas and are working with the Organic Seed Alliance to identify other varieties that might grow in the region and yield enough for their use.
Faced with the urgent need to start selling more tortillas, they added weekend shop hours, open to the public, to their Thursday and Friday wholesale routes servicing outlets including the food delivery service Kinfood and pop-ups like Comal and Dualidad.
Milpa Masa
Courtesy of Naomi TomkyRight now, Milpa Masa produces about 1000 tortillas a week, but Ruiz and Javier stand ready to scale as soon as orders come in – while they don’t ever plan to max out its capacity, their equipment can run as many as 3200 tortillas in an hour and they have a tank that can cook 400 pounds of corn at a time. “But we’re small batch,” says Ruiz. They currently work in 20-pound increments, which gets them about 160 tortillas. They offer both blue and yellow corn, in five-inch and six-inch sizes, by the ten-pack, plus occasional one-off batches like the local green corn ones from Viva Farms.
Because the tortillas use only corn, lime, and water, they don’t keep on the shelf like grocery store tortillas. But they last two weeks in the fridge, and months in a freezer, and come with precise directions on how to restore them to their soft but strong original texture using a little water and a hot pan.
Milpa Masa
Courtesy of Naomi TomkyWith the tortillas rolling off the conveyor cooling rack, Ruiz and Javier contemplate their next steps, including other ways to appeal directly to the customer. They plan to test other corn products like tostadas, tetelas or gorditas stuffed with beans and cheese, and even hope to try their hand at tamales that might qualify them for a farmers market spot by stuffing masa made from the local green corn with Washington asparagus.
But for all the hurdles Milpa Masa made it through in the last six years, and the ones sure to come as they find their way through the complicated process of starting a business in this unpredictable era, at least they never again have to roll through TSA dragging a suitcase filled with dozens of pounds of tortillas just to get a decent one in Seattle – and neither does anyone else.
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May 23, 2021 at 08:08PM
https://www.seattlepi.com/lifestyle/food/article/milpa-masa-brings-fresh-tortillas-to-seattle-16196217.php
Milpa Masa brings fresh tortillas to Seattle - seattlepi.com
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