What is Harina's meat?
in Spanish, Harina's meat literally means "flour dough", but many people use it specifically to indicate the type of coarse food made of corn, which was subjected to the process of nixtamization. This specially treated corn is used to produce tortillas, tamales and many other traditional Mexican foods. If you live in a region with Mexican food, you will probably find Harina meat and some larger markets also carry this food product. The corn is soaked after cooking and then rinsed repeatedly to remove caustic alkalia. After completing this process, corn is ground to create meat, coarse dough that can be used fresh or dried and sold as Harina meat.
Some chefs feel that fresh meat is better than Harina's meat. If you happen to live near the tortilla factories, you can be able to receive some fresh masses to try this difference for yourself. Other people feel that Harina's meat is absolutely sufficient to get upRobu tortil and other Mexican dishes. It can also be used somewhat like corn meal, although it has a much finer texture than corn meal.
Because Harina's meat is made of corn, it is usually gluten free and as a result they like to experiment with it with intolerant chefs and bakers. It certainly has a rough taste that can cause it to meet some ingredients, but can be used in things like biscuits and cakes, as well as in conventional torties.
It is important to avoid the confusing meat of Harina with corn flour or corn flour. The corn meal is produced by grinding corn, either dry or wet, but the corn is not first treated with lime. As a result, corn flour and flour behave differently than Harina's meat when baking and cooking. They are also not so nutritionally valuable nixtamized meat.
The nixtamization process has been developed in mesoamerice and is thousands of oldCe years old. In addition to softening the corn for grinding to meat, it also changes the structure of corn, releases nutritionally valuable niacin and adds calcium from the lime used as alkalia. This process has made corn excellent nutritional supplement to the diet of early Americans and explains why corn has become such an important crop across America.