How Tortillas Lost Their Magic

Photographs by Victor Llorente

At about midnight each weekday, a group of five men and women arrives at the darkened restaurant doors of Sobre Masa in Brooklyn and performs a sacred art of transformation. Heirloom corn—hundreds of pounds in shades of blue, yellow, red—is boiled and steeped for hours in an alkaline solution, a process called nixtamalization. Then it’s rinsed, milled, aerated, and finally passed through a machine that cuts the resulting masa dough into perfect tortillas and griddles them.