Making Tortillas

Every morning our host mother Vidalia wakes up at 5:30 am to make fresh tortillas for the day. She starts with a bucket of corn kernels that have been soaking in water and walks down the street to the Molino where she pays a few cents to have the corn ground into dough. Back at home she rolls out a handful of dough onto a piece of wax paper. With her right hand she slaps the dough flat while her left hand rotates the tortilla (many Nicaraguan women will have long fingernails on their left hand but have to cut the nails short on their tortilla-slapping right hand). Each tortilla is cooked individually on a cast iron skillet over the wood stove until it starts to puff up in the middle. These tortillas end up being much thicker than tortillas in Mexico or the U.S. and are almost a meal in themselves. To feed our family of eight, Vidalia makes 40 tortillas a day. The steady rhythm of women slapping out tortillas in the morning is as reliable as the rooster’s crow. Here is a video of Vidalia…

http://miadevine.smugmug.com/Nicaragua-Nov-Dec-2009/Sabana-Grande/10478184_Qg9P3#729016986_ZMktx