You can now buy fresh masa and tortillas from one of Philly’s best Mexican restaurants

There’s a dead-simple snack that chef Alexis Tellez, of Kensington’s Sor Ynez, remembers eating as a kid in Estado de Mexico, not far from Mexico City. It’s called taco de sal, or a salt taco: Sprinkle salt on a hot-off-the-press corn tortilla, then roll it up tight, pinwheel-style. “It’s all you need,” Tellez says. “It tastes like home.”

Tellez bid a yearslong farewell to the salt taco when, at age 8, he moved to New Hope. There he encountered his first store-bought tortillas: At a friend’s taco night, the family was using “those thin tortillas where you’re supposed to fry them,” Tellez says, grimacing at the memory. “Even if you try heating those up, it just becomes dry.”

As a chef in Philadelphia, Tellez can once again find masa and fresh corn tortillas: They’re sold by Italian Market vendors like Tortilleria San Roman and Masa Cooperativa, where Sor Ynez initially sourced its masa. But “it is a hassle going across the city,” he says. Last spring, Sor Ynez began making masa in-house for its tamales, tostadas, tacos, tlacoyos, and more. Starting last month, it began packaging fresh masa and fresh-griddled tortillas to sell to the public four days a week, making its masa the most readily available in Philly.

It can be hard to comprehend the difference between shelf-stable tortillas and those made with fresh masa — the supple dough made from grinding corn kernels that have been nixtamalized, or soaked and cooked in an alkaline solution — if you’ve never experienced it. A mass-produced tortilla is often a near-flavorless vessel, handy for getting a grip on a filling, and not much else. A just-pressed, still-warm corn tortilla is a single-ingredient stunner all by itself: a starchy, cushiony, chewy round that packs vibrant corn flavor with a hint of salt.

Corn tortillas dominate Philadelphia’s Puebla-inflected Mexican restaurant scene, and several spots make them from scratch, including El Molino Tortilleria, Casa Mexico, Condesa, LMNO, and Mission Taqueria. But none sell masa straight to consumers, and Masa Cooperativa only sells masa and fresh tortillas to the public from 8 to 11 a.m. on Sundays. (For handmade flour tortillas, head to Taco Heart.)

Sor Ynez’s masa initiative came about last December, when it offered a special menu of tamales to offset the slow holiday season. The restaurant initially used Maseca — the widely available, well-regarded corn flour — for the Tamal Project, but decided to test a batch with its own masa. “We couldn’t believe the difference. You forget it when you don’t have it for a long time,” Tellez says. The kitchen staff, most of whom hail from Mexico, was “so happy.”

Tellez and his team now want more people to know how transcendent a fresh corn tortilla can be. “People see it as a shell,” Tellez says. “To me, the masa itself is a star.”

Every Tuesday, prep cook Sandra Pantoja comes into Sor Ynez to ready 100 to 150 kilos of masa. She combines white corn with equal parts water and a dose of cal — calcium hydroxide or slaked lime — in a 60-quart stockpot.

The corn, chalqueño from Tlaxcala, Mexico, is important. The tooth-sized kernels are thoroughly dried and starchy, not sweet like local corn. But the most transformative element in this equation is the cal: Through the nixtamalization process, the alkaline softens the kernel, loosens its hull, breaks down the starch in the corn, and makes it more digestible.

Pantoja will simmer the mixture of corn, water, and cal gently for an hour or so — not too hot or it runs the risk of getting slimy — then let it sit overnight. Once drained and rinsed, the cooked corn is called nixtamal.

From there, it’s onto the mill, or molino. As a kid in Mexico, Tellez remembers hand-grinding nixtamal on a molino that attached to the kitchen table. He also remembers visiting relatives in Tlaxcala who grew, harvested, and dried their own corn; on certain occasions, they would drive an hour away to a molino station, where a mechanical molino as big as an oven would crank out enough masa to last a week or two. “That was if you had a big family or maybe a big event like a quinceañera or a birthday,” Tellez says.

Sor Ynez has a Molinito, an electric tabletop mill that can grind 50 kilos of nixtamal in hour. It’s equipped with two 5-inch basalt grindstones cut with grooves and ridges that turn cooked corn kernels into a pliant dough. Tellez gradually feeds cooked corn into a funnel just above the grindstones. Hundreds of flecks of dough come out the other side, bonding together like kinetic sand, or Play-Doh put through the finest holes of a cheese grater. Tellez vigilantly monitors the machine’s output, adding a little water if the dough is too dry, pushing through more corn if it’s too wet. “There’s no recipe to it,” he says. “You kinda just have to know.”

Tellez gathers the masa together as it accumulates, kneading it by hand, and portions out 45-gram hunks of dough for tortillas. “If it’s too wet,” he says, “the heat in your hands will help the water evaporate.” (Pantoja usually completes this step with a large stand mixer to even out the moisture and consistency — otherwise the 220-pound batch would take hours to get through.)

Sor Ynez opens Thursday through Sunday, so the cooked corn is usually ground into masa on Wednesdays, then allowed to rest in the walk-in refrigerator for one day, so that the tortillas can be fresh-pressed for service. The masa is brought out and comes to room temperature before it’s turned into tortillas. (A cold, raw tortilla will stick to the plancha and crack.)

Pantoja takes it from here. When she settles in behind the line — with a sheet pan stacked with dozens of masa balls and a tortilla press on one side, and a plancha (or flattop griddle) on the other — she is in her element: She places each ball in the center of the press, lined with a thin sheet of plastic, then smushes it into a disc. She snatches up the delicate round, turns it over, slaps it back down, and squashes it again.

“The goal is that you want it nice and flat, thin as you can,” Tellez says as Pantoja transfers the rounds to the hot plancha. There tortillas go from pancake-flat and stark white to pale yellow and wrinkly. She flips each one by hand a few times, shifting them to cooler spots on the plancha as she goes. In the two minutes it takes to cook through each tortilla, Pantoja constantly switches back and forth between the press and the plancha.

“You’ll see some of them will rise a little bit,” Tellez points out, referencing big and small air pockets that bubble up as the tortilla cooks through. He explains that if a tortilla doesn’t puff, it means the dough was too dry. “If you seal it properly, the steam will create on the inside and then it’ll separate it in two so they’ll stay nice and light.”

Pantoja cooks 20 tortillas at a time when she’s in full swing. As they’re done, she uses tongs to arrange them into a tidy stack to cool. They’re deployed within hours, for tacos, or served alongside barbacoa or carnitas. Leftover tortillas are used for making tostadas and enchiladas the next day.

This month, about a year into making masa in-house, Sor Ynez’s staff began setting aside masa and tortillas for retail sales. Tellez says the kilos of masa ($6/kilo) has been selling more slowly, but the tortillas ($8/12-pack) have been moving at a rapid clip.

Increasing masa output is more work, but Tellez thinks it’s well worth it. He’s hoping to partner with other restaurants to supply them with fresh tortillas and masa, but he’s also excited to offer it to everyday customers — especially those who know what they’re missing.

“It’s like bringing those memories back from your childhood,” he says. “To be able to share that with the whole community, especially the Hispanic community … it’s pretty cool.”

Sor Ynez,📍1800 N. American St. Unit G, Philadelphia, PA 19122, 📞 215-309-2582, 🌐 sorynez.com