Days before Día de los Muertos, an ultramarine ofrenda hugs the concrete blocks and a riot of marigold streamers flutters over the yard of Austin’s Mercado Sin Nombre. The modest café doesn’t yet have the budget for a proper sign—and only the buzzing line of customers snaking down the alley announces this is a place of business—but inside, chef Julian Maltby is quietly producing some of the city’s most innovative fare. What’s surprising about his cutting-edge perspective is that it’s built almost exclusively on the versatile foundation of corn.
Though handmade masa is now widely used in Texas restaurants, a new generation of Mexican American chefs and bakers is looking beyond the tortilla. Instead of relying upon traditional steamed milk in his array of coffee drinks, Maltby uses atole, a masa-based hot beverage with pre-Columbian origins. Blue corn appears in flaky biscuits slathered in espresso butter, and a yellow heirloom variety buttresses a weightless masa sponge cake injected with orange buttercream—the chef’s take on a Hostess Twinkie.
“It kind of represents a lot of what we’re trying to do: comfort food, but utilizing masa,” Maltby says. “We’re not in Oaxaca or Mexico City. We’re trying to remember that we’re here [in Austin] and not trying to replicate somewhere else. And something like a Twinkie is universal to me.”
Less than 2 miles away, another chef is taking a similarly playful approach to corn at Comadre Panadería. Helmed by James Beard Award-nominated baker Mariela Camacho, the East Austin spot specializes in pan dulce using a variety of flours, including mesquite, amaranth, and most importantly, corn flours. Masa plays a pivotal role in everything from her pink cake and puff pastry to signature atole sugar cookies flavored with Mexican cinnamon and piloncillo.
“Masa is the all-star in our kitchen,” Camacho says. “It brings a beautiful texture and unexpected flavor with a hint of savoriness.”
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These kinds of applications of corn dough are not without historical precedence. The ring-shaped masa cookies known as coricos are staples of Northern Mexican panaderías. Tejuino—a sweet, fermented masa beverage—dates to pre-Hispanic times. Still, Camacho approaches the ingredient differently. Instead of using maseca, the dehydrated corn flour commonly found on grocery shelves, she bakes with its fresh, more nutritious and pliable cousin.
For chefs like Maltby, using masa in innovative ways is also a means of connecting with their roots. The Mercado Sin Nombre owner became fascinated with the ancient crop while interning with French architect Ludwig Godefroy in Mexico City, work that later informed his graduate thesis work at the University of New Mexico. Camacho, meanwhile, began exploring corn as an extension of her family’s Mexican American heritage.
“I didn’t grow up with my parents making that stuff,” she says. “For me, masa is a part of reclaiming my culture. I thought, why don’t I know how to do this?”
That restoration of tradition is producing exhilarating cuisine across Texas. At Dallas agave bar Ruins, tejuino is mixed with corn whiskey, cinnamon, and tamarind sorbet in the specialty cocktail Si Dios Quiere. And the tasting menu at the vaunted Tatemó in Houston’s Spring Branch district often includes a modernized take on nicuatole, a pre-Columbian gelled dessert.
“We’re finding creative ways to make masa sing in almost a jarring way,” Maltby says. “You expect a biscuit to taste a certain way, but when it contains a hint of something different, it almost makes you focus on it more. It’s atypical compared to corn in a taco.”
Like the fare at Mercado Sin Nombre, the new crop of masa dishes may be inspired by nostalgia but are reworked in wholly contemporary ways. What’s old can be startlingly new.
As Texas’ pool of talent continues to explore the versatile crop, expect it to pop up in an array of boundary-pushing entrees, breads, and even mocktails. At this point, the only limit is one chef’s imagination.
