Tortilla-making is an art that requires just as much craft as baking a loaf of sourdough or a flaky croissant, and one Kansas City bakery is thought to make the “best” in the US. A
As a child in Sonora, Mexico, Marissa Gencarelli took good tortillas for granted. She didn’t have to make them at home – there were tortillerias on almost every corner passing fresh flour and corn tortillas through an open window.
But when she moved to Kansas City, Missouri, with her husband, Mark, she found a void. The city had plenty of tortillerias, but few were using heirloom nixtamal – corn steeped in an alkaline solution that unlocks more of the corn’s flavour and nutrients (the nixtamalisation process dates back to ancient Mesoamerica ). Even fewer were making the thin, chewy, Sonoran-style flour tortillas she craved. If Marissa wanted a tortilla that reminded her of home, she was going to have to make her own.
And she did. The Gencarellis started feverishly testing recipes in their home kitchen, punctuated by some time in her hometown of Obregón training under her friend Enrique Rodriguez, who ran a tortilleria next to the Guadalupe church. The hard work paid off. In 2017, the Gencarellis launched Yoli Tortilleria in Kansas City. And this past June, Yoli won the James Beard Foundation ‘s coveted “Outstanding Bakery” award – the first tortilleria ever to win the national award.
To the Gencarellis, the James Beard award was an important institutional recognition of something they’d known all along: that tortilla-making is an art (and a science) that requires just as much dedication and craft as baking a loaf of sourdough or a flaky croissant.
“Immigrant food always gets undervalued,” said Marissa. “Everybody wants dollar tacos, or whatever it is nowadays. And [the award] just puts it into a different level and perspective, where the rest of the world is going to learn to value the tortilla because now it’s being recognised at that level.”
Tortilla-making is an art for Marissa and Mark Gencarelli of Yoli Tortilleria (Credit: Jed Portman)
The James Beard award was also an important recognition of the work they’ve already done to teach Americans how to think about the tacos on their plate. The void of great tortillas in Kansas City may have presented a business opportunity, but it was also, Marissa said, “a huge mountain to climb”.
“Really challenging,” Mark agreed. “More than we ever anticipated.”
The challenge? Consumers in Kansas City were used to cheap commodity tortillas – the sweet, stick-to-your-teeth variety laced with additives to soften them and extend their shelf life. The Gencarellis knew they were going to have to essentially create a market for what (then) seemed like a specialty product. They started offering “tortilla tastings” at a suburban farmer’s market to introduce customers to the flavour and to different types of corn.
They also were careful to instruct both chefs and home cooks on how to cook with their tortillas. “You have to do high heat, fast,” Marissa said. “If you have a tortilla that has a lot of softeners and additives, you can just put it on the griddle and it can be there for a long time without getting hard. With a nixtamal tortilla, you have to go fast.”
In the early days of the business, the Gencarellis would wake up at 03:00 to nixtamalise corn or press the tortillas before heading to their full-time corporate day jobs. Now, they’re all in: they run an expansive (and expanding) manufacturing facility, operate a cosy retail store in a historically Latino neighbourhood of Kansas City, and manage about 15 employees.
Visit the retail store today and you’re likely to be offered a blistered Sonoran-style flour tortilla, hot off the griddle, to eat while you shop. That’s the style of tortilla most associated with Sonora, a northern Mexican state with robust wheat production – and, accordingly, a preference for flour over corn. But there’s room for both types in the state, in Marissa’s shop and in northern Mexican cuisine. One of Marissa’s favourite roadside meals growing up in Obregón, she said, was a shrimp breakfast taco served on a fresh white corn tortilla.
Although the flavours are appropriate for any time of day, Marissa considers it a breakfast taco in part because the tacos would sell out long before the lunch crowds arrived. She and her father – a boxer-turned-lawyer with a hearty appetite – would try to visit a particular bicycle vendor as soon as he set up shop at 09:00.
“There was no official carreta [cart] like some of the corner taqueros [taco sellers] have,” she said. “This guy literally had buckets of shrimp hanging out of his bike and then a metal trash can contraption filled with oil where he would fry the shrimp over a wood fire.”
That particular taquero is no longer peddling shrimp in Obregón. But his tacos were the last meal Marissa shared with her father before his death in a car accident, making the dish even more poignant and urgent for her to preserve.
Marissa’s version of the taquero’s recipe stays true to the key elements – golden brown fried shrimp, crisp confetti strips of cabbage, bright pickled onions and a nutty salsa marisquera negra (black seafood salsa) to dot on top.
“It holds a lot of meaning to me,” she said. “I had to recreate it.”
These Sonoran-style tacos are filled with crispy shrimp, nutty salsa and pickled onions (Credit: Jed Portman)
Sonoran-Style Shrimp Tacos recipe
By Marissa Gencarelli
Makes 10 tacos
Ingredients
For the pickled onions:
1 tsp fine sea salt
1 red onion, thinly sliced
½ cup unseasoned rice vinegar
½ cup apple cider vinegar
pinch of oregano, preferably Mexican oregano
For the salsa marisquera negra (black seafood salsa):
12 chillies de arbol (dried)
2 ancho chillies
¾ cup grapeseed oil
¼ cup olive oil
¼ cup raw peanuts
10 black garlic cloves, chopped (see Note)
2 raw garlic cloves, finely chopped
1 tsp granulated sugar
1 tsp fine sea salt
⅛ cup white wine vinegar
1 tbsp soy sauce
1 tbsp lime juice
For the fried shrimp:
½ cup all-purpose flour
½ cup cornflour
1 tsp smoked paprika
1 tsp of granulated tomato bouillon (if unavailable, sub chicken bouillon)
½ tsp fine sea salt
¾ cup sparkling water
450g (1lb) peeled and deveined medium shrimp
wood skewers
vegetable oil for frying (about 2 litres/½ gallon)
For assembling the tacos:
mayonnaise, preferably Kewpie brand
½ head white cabbage, very thinly sliced
10 white corn tortillas
Method
Step 1
To make the pickled onions, in a bowl, sprinkle salt on the sliced onions and let rest for 5 minutes. Add both vinegars and the oregano and mix well. Let the onions rest while you prepare the rest of the meal.
Step 2
To make the salsa marisquera nega, remove the stems from all the dried chillies and remove the seeds from the ancho chillies only. Cut the ancho chillies into thin strips.
Step 3
In a large saucepan, heat the grapeseed and olive oils to 175C/350F. Add the raw peanuts and fry until toasted, about 2 minutes; remove with a slotted spoon and transfer to a kitchen paper-lined plate. Add the chillies to the oil until crisp, about 2 minutes. To the chillies, add all of the garlic, sugar and salt; stir until sugar has dissolved. Turn off the heat and add the vinegar, soy sauce, and lime juice. Transfer to a blender with the peanuts and blend until smooth.
Step 4
To make the shrimp, heat the vegetable oil to 190C/375F in a heavy-bottomed pot. While the oil heats, sift the flour, cornflour, smoked paprika, bouillon and sea salt through a fine mesh strainer into a bowl; discard any clumps. Add the sparkling water to the dry ingredients and stir until smooth.
Step 5
Slide a skewer through the head and tail of each shrimp, ensuring the shrimp is straight. (You can fry up to 2 shrimp on each skewer.) Dip the shrimp in batter until coated and fry until golden-brown, about 2-3 minutes. Remove the skewers from oil and place on a paper-lined plate to drain. Let the shrimp cool for 1 minute before removing from skewers.
Step 6
To assemble the tacos, warm the corn tortillas in a dry frying pan over high heat, no more than 30 seconds per side. Spread about 1 tsp of mayonnaise on each tortilla and add pieces of 2 shrimp. Top with sliced cabbage and pickled onions and drizzle with the salsa marisquera negra.
Note
Black garlic is aged fresh garlic that has a rich, sweet-savoury flavour. If you are unable to get black garlic, the best sub would be 10 cloves of roasted garlic mixed with a splash of balsamic vinegar.
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