What is the alkaline cooking process?
The alkaline cooking process is used to make corn chips, corn tortillas, and corn tortilla chips. While many tortillas in the United States are made from wheat flour, corn tortillas the traditional favorite throughout Latin America. In the alkaline cooking process, corn is cooked in a 0.5-2% lime (calcium hydroxide) solution at 98-100°C for 5-60 or more minutes. The traditional name for the cooked corn is nixtamal; the cooking process is nixtamalization. During nixtamalization, the pericarp (outer seed covering) is dissolved. The dissolved pericarp is rinsed away and the nixtamal is ground to make masa (tortilla dough). The masa can be flattened by several methods and baked to a finished tortilla. To make corn tortilla chips, masa is formed into a thin sheet and cut to the desired chip shape. The raw chips are toasted to remove some of the water (imparting the characteristic black toast points observable on one side of a chip) then fried in hot oil. Additional seasonings or flavorings
