Tortilla Tuesdays: Diana's Tortillas

DianasTortillas.jpg
Linnea Lieberman

Diana's is a chain of restaurants, bakeries and tortillerías in what are loosely termed the "Gateway" cities--in other words, the suburbs south and east of Los Angeles. I've never been to the restaurants, but my wife picked up a package of their tortillas at our local Albertson's.

The package had all sorts of stars and loud advertisement--a good source of calcium! Made with fresh corn! Nonsense--tortillas are made from nixtamal, which is dried field corn that's been boiled and then soaked in water with lime (called cal) before being de-hulled and ground. Any fresh corn that gets put in there is purely incidental, and added after the fact.

The tortillas folded nicely when heated on a comal. The taste was unremarkable; certainly there was no taste of fresh corn in them. The list of ingredients was uninspiring--a bunch of preservatives. One thing to note is that the weight was odd--29 ounces is an odd weight for a package tortillas.

What really frosted my butt, though, was that the tortillas were long-lasting--way, way too long-lasting, since they were still pliable and soft a week and a half later. Even at ten days old, they didn't split when we took them out of the package. Ten-day-old tortillas ought to crack like Charlie Sheen. It's how you can tell whether the tortillas are old, and they're cheating the system--the ingredients list contained a bunch of preservatives. ¡Yo nací en agosto, pero no fue este agosto!

Maybe they'd be different straight from the tortillería, but frankly, when shopping at Albertson's, you can do better than Diana's.

Grade: C

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