tortilla "chips"

[baratron]

Richard says I am mad. The reason is this: I have always been confused by the naming of tortilla chips. Now, I have known for some time that "chips" are just what American English calls crisps, yet my brain doesn't seem to apply this to tortillas. Instead, I get confused. When you chip the furniture, or are "a chip off the old block", or even when you chip a potato, you're breaking a small piece off a larger thing. This isn't what happens with tortilla chips. They're not made by making a large tortilla and then breaking it up, they're made intentionally small. And that doesn't make sense.

Yes, I realise that what probably happened was that tortilla chips were originally made by breaking up a large tortilla, and even that triangular tortilla chips could be imagined to be part of a large circular tortilla - but what about the small circular ones? They can't possibly be pieces of a single large tortilla... not unless there's a lot of waste.

Richard says that the whole dilemma can be solved by simply calling them "nachos", but I had a vague feeling that this name refers to the dish made by adding salsa and jalapenos and/or cheese to the chips, not to the chips themselves? Hmmm.

Comments

[nmg.livejournal.com]

You're right in your intuition - tortilla chips are better known as totopos in Mexico, and are a way of using up stale (corn) tortillas by cutting them into eighths and frying them, but I've also been served totopos made from wheat tortillas. Both are good, and quite unlike the industrial tortilla chips.

I'm not sure if nachos is authentic Mexican or a Tex-Mex adaptation, but it could be a simplified adaptation of tostaditas for foreign palates (tostaditas are totopos with a topping).

I'm also not sure how they make the industrial tortilla chips - whether they make a big sheet of corn and press out the shapes individually (wastage, as you rightly point out), or make the shapes like individual tortillas (pressed from a stiff dough of masa harina). My intuition is that for the triangular chips they probably extrude dough through a triangular nozzle, chop it to form little dairylea-shaped bits of a firm polenta-like consistency and then roll those to form the final shapes.

[nmg.livejournal.com]

Bloody hell - I've just found this:

The finished masa (cornmeal dough) is conveyed to a sheeter, where it is roll-reduced to the proper thickness - 0.10 in. for standard restaurant "table" tortilla chips, 0.03 in. for a Tostito-type snack chip. The dough is cut into a final shape (e.g. round deli-style vs. wedge-shaped restaurant-style), and conveyed into a triple-pass gas-fired oven, where the chips are baked for 15 to 30 seconds at 575° to 600°F. This removes moisture from the chips, which then enter an equilibrator, allowing residual moisture to evaporate or migrate evenly, and preventing blistering or puffing due to pockets of moisture forming and evaporating when the chips contact the frying oil.

So they make a big sheet and cut the shapes out - I never would have guessed at that!