Corundas

As tradition built it

Corundas

Makes 25. Steamed 1 hour.

Ingredients

• 1kg corn masa, nixtamalised with lime, then washed and ground (some households use wood ash rather than lime)
• 250g lard
• 1/2 cup warm water
• 1 tsp salt
• a pinch bicarbonate of soda
• 1.5 cups rice flour
• 1.5 cups crumbled fresh cheese
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 30 hoja de milpa leaves, cut from the standing maize plant itself

Method

1. Mix the nixtamalised, ground masa with lard, water or milk, salt, rice flour, baking powder and a pinch of bicarbonate of soda.
2. Wrap in hoja de milpa: lay the leaf perpendicular, then place a portion of masa leaving roughly 7 cm free at the lower end.
3. Fold that end over to start a triangle, continuing the fold along the leaf's length without losing the triangular shape, and tap the points flat at the end; the result carries seven sides, though three, four or other counts appear depending on the fold.
4. Steam for 1 hour until the masa comes away cleanly from the leaf, and serve with crumbled fresh cheese. Yields 25.

What a modern chef changes

Fresh Leaf, Blended Cheese, Egg-Smoked Steam

Rung 03

Method

1. Fold the corn-plant leaves fresh rather than the more commonly available dried, steaming them briefly first for pliability, a genuine improvement on aroma the dried leaf alone cannot give.
2. Blend the fresh cheese portion through a high-power blender before folding it through the masa for a more even distribution than crumbling by hand achieves.
3. Steam over a Big Green Egg run as a steamer with a water pan, the same enclosed, moist-heat logic as the birria pit, for a slightly smokier finished corunda than a domestic steamer gives.