Kernels of Truth
There are few more satisfying experiences than biting into a warm, fresh tortilla that’s tender to the bite with a fragrant aroma and rich in flavor — sweet or nutty, depending on the variety of corn. A good corn tortilla is made from three simple ingredients: corn, water and lime. The emulsifiers and gums used in familiar supermarket tortillas are often bland and dry — a very different experience.
A second-generation Mexican American from Southern California, Ramón Germán was working as a chef and missing the tortillas of his childhood when he had a “jump off the couch” moment watching a Netflix Chef’s Table episode on Mexico and headed to Oaxaca in 2018.
“The women are the most powerful cooks in Mexico, so going there and asking for permission as a man, I had to step back and think you’re not a chef here, you’re a visitor here, you have to do whatever it takes. So, I did a six-month apprenticeship at Casa Oaxaca,” says Germán who worked 8 to 12 hours a day learning what he could. Every night, he’d head upstairs where the women were making fresh tortillas. One of the women reminded him of his grandmother. “I just looked at her and she reminded me a lot of my grandma, and we just started talking. I was trying to understand what she was doing. And it was just the smells of fresh tortillas being made, the corn varieties they were using, and it was just wow. I learned so much in that period of time when I was there.”
During his time in Mexico, a friend’s mom showed Germán the entire process of cooking corn from kernel to table: “It was just getting one-on-one attention, she told me how to cook the corn, what to look for, the flavors, the smells” says Germán. And although she tried to dissuade him from accompanying her to the community mill where kernels are ground into masa, saying it was only for women, he persisted, wanting to learn the entire process, telling her, “I don’t care what people think of me, I wanna carry that bucket of corn and walk with you to the city mill.” Germán said it was amazing to see women lining up at four or five in morning with buckets of corn waiting to process them.
Taking the knowledge he learned in Mexico, Germán returned to O‘ahu and opened Raiz Tortillas with his wife Kim, who he met while working as a chef for the Four Seasons O‘ahu and she worked as a marketing manager.
Raiz translated to English can refer to origin or community roots. It’s a fitting name for their tortilleria that makes small-batch fresh corn tortillas using heirloom varieties of corn, full of flavor and nutrients and cooked using traditional methods.
“Sin maíz, no hay país” — without corn, there is no country, is a Mexican proverb that expresses how central corn is to its identity and culture and is often mentioned in the growing movement by chefs and food producers to ensure small farmers in Mexico growing biodiverse crops have a viable future.
“You don’t see that kind of corn nowadays. It’s going extinct. For me as a chef, my job is to share these things with customers, with their friends and family and share that culture with them, because that corn, it’s special, it’s just not any kind of corn. Every corn has a unique flavor and unique usage. We started this business to share that with Hawai‘i and our friends and family. And, you know, we’ve been blessed,” says Germán.