Flour Tortillas: A Staple of Domestic Persistence

In Monterrey, Nuevo Leon, a tortillería celebrates the collision of Spanish, Indigenous, and Sephardic converso traditions.

by Barbara Gonzalez

Traffic on Avenida Gonzalitos before 7 a.m. is surprisingly light, and I regretted rushing out of the house and leaving behind the water bottle Dana Paolillo, the co-owner of flour tortillería Las D’Harina, had warned me to bring.

“It can get really warm here,” she had said on the phone. “You have to come early if you want to see how everything works.” 

Las D’Harina is located on a busy avenue in colonia Cumbres, just northwest of downtown Monterrey, Nuevo León, Mexico. But when I arrive, I find parking easily as the city is barely waking up.  

Inside the shop, the workstations and silver machines glisten under bright lights. Dana, her husband Carlos Ferreira, and their collaborator Vivi García are already on the move, clad in bakers’ uniforms and black caps. I’m given my own black cap to wear as I settle in to witness them load ingredients into the dough mixer. Soon the air is perfumed with a sweet, yeasty smell.

Once the dough is kneaded, it’s transported in big buckets to the boleadora machine. From one side, Vivi pushes in the dough. On the other side, Dana welcomes the small and uniform spheres called testales onto a tray. Working swiftly with her hands, Dana makes sure each one is the right shape and weight, no imperfections. 

The testales that don’t make the cut get passed to Carlos, who weighs and reshapes them at a nearby table. Machines like the boleadora streamline the process, Carlos says, allowing them to handle much higher volumes.

On a normal day the shop makes 90 kilograms of masa. This morning they will be making three different sizes of tortillas to fulfill orders.

 “People have no idea of everything that needs to happen before they have a tortilla at their table,” Dana says.

When the dough has rested, Carlos moves towards a strange, sci-fi-looking apparatus. This is the centerpiece of the tortillería: a big glass box containing a spiral conveyor that acts as the heating comal or griddle.

Carlos climbs onto a stool and begins flattening the testales into discs, feeding them into the machine from above. The discs are pressed further and sent on their way down the spiral. As they travel, the dough puffs up trapping the steam until the tortillas become tortillas.

Dana hands me one of the first that comes out. It is still hot; the texture is soft and yielding. I fold it and take a bite. Thin, warm starch, with a distinct fatty note. Somehow, it melts in my mouth. 

A hybrid culinary tradition

Though this tortillería’s owners are now skilled with masa and machinery, neither Dana nor Carlos grew up in the tortilla business. 

They met in San Francisco, got married, then lived in Portugal, Carlos’s home country. When they decided to settle in Monterrey, Dana’s hometown, they knew they wanted to start a small business.  

Carlos already had experience in the food industry, and after the neighborhood tortillería closed, they decided to step in. Though they learned from experienced tortilleros, the bulk of their learning, they say, has been through trial and error and customer feedback. 

A handwritten note taped on the wall beside the kneading machine reveals their flour tortilla recipe, which they’ve been perfecting since they started the business in 2023. (When I asked to photograph it, though, they said they’d rather keep it secret.)

“We realized there were many brands of flour and lard and many improvers that enhance the quality and the shelf-life of the tortillas,” says Carlos. But both he and Dana are staunchly critical of “zombie” tortillas—those with too many interventions and ingredients—and are committed to only high-quality ingredients and natural preservatives like vinegar.

Wheat flour, water, salt and fat are the four essential ingredients of a flour tortilla. For centuries. Only the type of fat or the addition of leavening agents vary by regional style and historical period.

While the corn tortilla is firmly rooted in ancient Mesoamerica, the flour tortilla is a product of the colonial era with two distinct origin stories. In the North of New Spain—the territory that is now the Californias, Arizona, Sonora, and Chihuahua—the flour tortilla began to take shape, so to speak, when Catholic priests started growing wheat for the Eucharist and religious celebrations at their missions in the 1600s. The priests taught Indigenous people to make bread, and the women, already experts at making corn tortillas on griddles, began applying that technique to the wheat flour.  

Nixtamalization was a key part of making corn tortillas in Mesoamerica. The corn kernels were soaked and cooked in a bath of water mixed with lime or ash. Women would then spend hours on their knees using a mano and metate (a hand-held stone and a flat rectangular grinding stone) to work the corn kernels into a wet pliable dough or masa.  

But in the arid North, making flour tortillas was a different and much simpler process. No nixtamalization was necessary, and women used a rolling pin to manage the elasticity of the wheat gluten. Crucially, lard was added to disrupt the formation of gluten and to ensure the tortillas remained tender. 

In the Northeast of New Spain—an area that comprised the modern-day states of Coahuila, Nuevo León, Tamaulipas, and Texas—the flour tortilla emerged as a synthesis of a Mediterranean culinary tradition brought by the converso settlers and the technical expertise of the Tlaxcalteca people, according to Cuitláhuac Córdova, a culinary researcher who has spent a decade mapping the rural traditions of Tamaulipas. 

“The flour tortilla is cryptojewish,” Córdova says. “They were carrying on their tradition of pan ácimo (unleavened bread).” 

In the late 16th century, Luis de Carvajal led a group of settlers to establish the Nuevo Reino de León,the vast colonial jurisdiction that extended across the Northeastern frontier. Carvajal and many of his followers were descendants of conversos, Jewish people who had officially converted to Catholicism to escape persecution in Spain and Portugal. Some speculate that the addition of pork lard to their flat breads served as “proof of blood” meant to assure others that they were no longer practicing their old faith.

The recipe for flour tortillas in the Northeast further evolved with the arrival of the Tlaxcalteca people from central Mexico. Long at war with the Aztecs, the Tlaxcaltecas became allies of the Spanish during the Conquest and were rewarded with privileges. Beginning in 1591, 400 Tlaxcaltecan families migrated from central Mexico to the Northeast of New Spain to help “pacify” the region. The Tlaxcalteca brought with them the technology of the corn tortilla and the comal to the Northeastern frontier, Córdova says. There, it eventually merged with the Sephardic tradition of flat breads.

After independence from Spain, the corn tortilla reigned supreme in central and southern Mexico, while the flour tortilla persisted in the North. In the early 20th century, the flour tortilla even served as a marker of status. Francisco Bulnes, a prominent intellectual and adviser of President Porfirio Díaz, argued that Mexico’s lack of progress was tied to its corn-based diet. Bulnes’s racist views promoted the transition to a wheat diet to Europeanize the country. 

Far away from the halls where Porfirian elites discussed the “civilizing” effect of wheat, women in the Northern states continued to make flour tortillas on their own terms, as they had been doing for centuries. The sobaquera of Sonora, the ultimate expression of the North’s flour tortilla, consolidated as a dominant staple: a gigantic, paper-thin tortilla with extra water added to the dough allowing for greater elasticity. 

And in the Northeast, the late 19th century introduction of Royal baking powder was a changemaker. Flour tortilla makers in Tamaulipas, Nuevo León, and Coahuila embraced this popular leavening agent to achieve the “puff” that defines the region’s tortillas. By the mid-20th century pork lard was being replaced by vegetable shortenings like manteca Inca, providing a more neutral flavor, extending shelf life, and making production more profitable. 

Contrary to common misconceptions in both central Mexico and the United States, the northern flour tortilla in Mexico is neither an imported fad nor a colonial imposition. In the states that border the U.S., it signifies an impressive domestic persistence, a profound culinary hybrid born of the collision of Spanish, Indigenous, and Sephardic converso traditions.

Savored by the diaspora and at home

At Las D’Harina, Dana and Carlos know from their customers that generations of families in Monterrey have relied on flour tortillas as a dietary staple. 

For many in the region, early memories involve mothers and grandmothers flattening the small discs on the kitchen table with a rolling pin or a metal press. Their skilled hands would snatch the tortillas hot from the comal, swipe them with butter or a smear of beans, and hand them to eager children. 

“Kids are really our star clients,” Dana says. “They tell their moms they want the tortillas.”

Arturo Montemayor, a creator based in Austin, Texas and known to food lovers for his TikTok account, Cocinartu, grew up in Monterrey. His culinary channel serves as a bridge to the Regio diaspora (people originally from Monterrey) living in the US. 

As a child, Montemayor remembers watching his grandmother make flour tortillas from scratch at her round kitchen table “with her apron full of flour.” Today he still enjoys flour tortillas for breakfast with eggs and while eating guisos norteños like chicharrón, picadillo, or deshebrada. 

He believes most of the flour tortillas sold in the U.S. are not as tasty as those found in Monterrey. “I think the biggest crime against the flour tortilla here is that they have way too many ingredients,” he says. 

He adds that commercial flour tortillas in the US sometimes smell like plastic, perhaps due to added preservatives. To avoid this, Montemayor tries to buy tortillas crudas (raw dough) whenever he’s in Monterrey or when he can find them in Texas, so he can cook them at home. 

For Las D’Harina, this widespread desire for “just-made” tortillas is the engine of their business model. “Our clients always want las del día,” Dana says. 

She holds up a batch that looks pale, almost underdone. “We sell them like this on purpose, because if we toasted them here, they would turn to cardboard when the client reheats them at home.” 

Nearby, Vivi arranges stacks of tortillas on the cooling tables and performs quality control. Las D’Harina packages all tortillas by hand to make sure they’re uniform in size. 

The tortillería offers various tortilla sizes: the tortilla taquera, the smallest, meant for breakfast tacos and kids’ lunches; the tortilla de mesa, used regularly at home; and a larger size made for the famous tacos piratas of Monterrey that are made with a flour tortilla, carne asada, avocado and melted cheese. 

 “See this one?” Dana says. “The borders are breaking. We don’t package them, but they do not go to waste. We donate them to the community.”

The first customer of the morning, a woman on her way to work, arrives, and Dana hurries behind the counter. In the jargon of Mexican commerce, this moment is called the “cruz,” or cross, the first sale that signals a prosperous day ahead. 

The woman orders two packages of flour tortillas and a small bag of gorditas de azúcar, which might be described as “sugared fatties.” These sweet treats, also known as tortillas de harina de azúcar, are thicker and smaller than flour tortillas and are often sold alongside them in the Northeast. Gorditas are made by adding sugar, egg, and vanilla to the base ingredients of traditional flour tortillas. At Las D’Harina’s the gorditas are strictly handmade and cannot be scaled with the same efficiency, yet they remain a fixture because customers ask for them. 

In a small room behind the counter, a pressure cooker hums with beans made with Dana’s mother’s recipe and cartons of eggs displayed at the counter are also available for purchase. 

While many small vendors approach the store to sell their products, Dana and Carlos only accept those that complement their flour tortillas. With beans, eggs, and the gorditas de azúcar, Las D’Harina has become more than a tortilleria, it’s an extension of the familiar flavors that Regios cherish at their own homes on a daily basis. 

“We’ve had people take our tortillas across the country and even abroad,” Dana says. One influencer posted on Instagram a photo of a care package brought by a visitor from Monterrey that included flour tortillas from Las D’Harina. The caption cheekily read “Este es el cover para venir a mi casa.” (“This is the entrance fee to my home”).

That sounds about as good an endorsement as any. But, of course, I’ll judge for myself. I return my black cap and thank the crew for letting me witness the process.  

“You can always freeze the tortillas if you don’t want to eat them right away,” Dana calls out, as I head back into the city. 

Nice tip, but the stack I carry out with me won’t make it to the freezer. This humble staple and symbol of regional identity already has friends and family waiting for a taste. 

Barbara Gonzalez is a writer and activist based in Monterrey, México. She has an M.Phil. in Latin American Studies from the University of Oxford and a BA in International Relations from the Tecnológico de Monterrey.