2WIF1402HD_Tortilleria Zepeda_Carne Asada Transcript

- Luke Zahm: This week on Wisconsin Foodie: How many tortillas do you usually produce in a day?

- Julian Zepeda: A lot, yeah.

- Tortilleria Zepeda, authentic Mexican-style tortillas utilizing local corn.

- Heidi Zepeda: Being able to work with local farmers is something that's really near and dear to us. Heartland Craft Grains grow a blue variety of corn.

- Luke: This is so cool. And this is one of those processes that takes care, time, attention, and love. I need to see my favorite butcher, David Gathy, in Madison. Fat equals flavor, right?

- Yeah, 100%.

- Luke: I'm on my way to the Owl Farm to make some carne asada tacos. To take these Wisconsin ingredients and be able to be transported to another location somewhere in the world, but knowing that you're still supporting your friends and neighbors who are the farmers and food producers. It's beautiful. Let's get started. Wisconsin Foodie would like to thank the following underwriters.
[gentle guitar music]

- The dairy farmers of Wisconsin are proud to underwrite Wisconsin Foodie and remind you that in Wisconsin, we dream in cheese.
[people cheering]

Just look for our badge. It's on everything we make.

- Did you know Organic Valley protects over 400,000 acres of organic farmland? So are we an organic food cooperative that protects land or land conservationists who make delicious food? Yes. Yes, we are. Organic Valley.
[lively banjo music]

- Employee-owned New Glarus Brewing Company has been brewing and bottling beer for their friends, only in Wisconsin, since 1993. Just a short drive from Madison, come visit "Swissconsin" and see where your beer's made.

- Wisconsin's great outdoors has something for everyone. Come for the adventure, stay for the memories. Go wild in Wisconsin. To build your adventure, visit dnr.wi.gov.

- Twenty-minute commutes. Weekends on the lake. Warm welcomes and exciting career opportunities. Not to mention all the great food! There's a lot to look forward to in Wisconsin. Learn more at InWisconsin.com.

- With additional support coming from The Conscious Carnivore. From local animal sourcing to on-site, high-quality butchering and packaging, The Conscious Carnivore can ensure organically raised, grass-fed, and healthy meats through its small group of local farmers. The Conscious Carnivore: Know your farmer, love your butcher.

- Luke: Additional support from the following underwriters. Also with the support of Friends of PBS Wisconsin.
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We are storytellers. We are Wisconsin Foodie.
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I'm on the road today to beautiful Lone Rock, Wisconsin to meet with the owners of Tortilleria Zepeda. Julian and Heidi create authentic, Mexican-style tortillas utilizing local corn. I am so excited to meet up with them and walk through this process.

- My name is Heidi Zepeda and I am co-owner of Tortilleria Zepeda. 

Our tortillas are made with the process called nixtamalization. We get the dry corn from the farmers. We cook it in an alkaline solution. It soaks, generally overnight. The next day, we take that corn, we rinse it, and then we grind it. 

We don't add any special ingredients; there's no additives. The only ingredient in our tortillas is corn. 

You know, in college, I had the opportunity to go study and live in Mexico. Fell in love with the culture and the food. And then I meet this wonderful man named Julian Zepeda. 

I'm incredibly proud of my husband, Julian. When we moved here in 2016, he had never left Mexico before. His English level was pretty rudimentary, very beginner. Culturally, it was such a big change. He'd driven a car three times and it was all these learning curves. You gotta learn to drive, you gotta speak, you know, decent English, you gotta adjust to this culture. And just with some of the immigration barriers, just, he went through a lot just to be here. And that passion and that drive to come to our country just speaks so much to this business because... Whew.
[laughs]

He, Julian, embodies the American dream to the extreme. He brings me to tears. 

Part of our philosophy to make us an authentic tortilleria is to really use the corn from the land of where we're located. So one of our concerns when we started a tortilleria in Lone Rock, Wisconsin is how are we gonna have an authentic Mexican corn tortilla without importing corn from Mexico? 

Well, luckily, we're in this Driftless Area where there's many organic, many corn farmers abundant, 7 miles up the road, 30 miles up the road. 

And so using corn from where the land is where we're located, I think we're really doing a great job of paying tribute to these Indigenous cultures of what they did, and practicing that tradition so we can really have an authentic Mexican corn tortilla here in Lone Rock without having to import corn. 

Yeah, so we're headed right now to Lodi, Wisconsin to go visit the wonderful people of Heartland Craft Grains. They're a couple, Rochelle and Evan, who grow different types of grains and corns, heirloom corns on a lot smaller scale. And some of their mission, you know, is really the regenerative farming, really passionate about agriculture. And so they grow a blue variety of corn, which we use to make blue tortillas.

- Evan Schnadt, co-owner and farmer, Heartland Craft Grains. We have corn, two different varieties of corn planted here. Out in the distance, we have Einkorn, which is the first wheat that was made from wild grasses. So that's, like, 10,000-year-old genetics. 

The next slot over there is spelt. That's 5,000-year-old genetics. We've got modern rye, we've got modern wheat. So we kind of span the gamut of modern, old, different corn varieties trying to find again, just what's the right answer? What's the most flavorful and nutritious that our customers are gonna love? 

Tortilleria Zepeda was going a few years before us and we knew about them and yeah, it just kinda converged where we were growing some of these unique varieties. And it kinda goes back to the point of not many people are growing these. So by us as farmers willing to not just go the common path, like, branch out and grow these unique varieties that require a little bit different management, and you've gotta create your own market and form those relationships.

- Hey, Evan.

- Hey, Heidi, how's it going?

- Good, good to see you.

- There's not that elevator that's just takin' our blue corn to drop off any time. So you've gotta have that end user if you're gonna go with this route to really make it worthwhile. And then to have that feedback, you know, it's kind of a upward spiral of here, this is cool, we can grow that, do you like it? Yes, no, and then keep, you know, keep fueling on that dynamic. We can do our thing and enable them to do their thing even better and grow more authentic varieties for what they're trying to do.

- Being able to work with local farmers is something that's really near and dear to us. For us to be able to give back and purchase from our neighbors in the local farms to keep them going is one of my favorite things about this business.
[bright music]

- Julian, thank you so much for having us in here today. Will you walk me through the steps to making these amazing tortillas?

- Well, this corn has been already nixtamalized. It's been soaked 24 hours, so that mean it's already absorbed everything that it's supposed to, have all the calcium and the different, like, chemical reaction happening. And you can see how, like, even the size of the kernel is almost double than it used to be.

- You get that, like, out of a good tortilla, you get that, like, really earthy balance to it. There's almost no inherent sweetness.

- Yeah.

- I mean, the sugars are gone. What happens next? Walk me through the magic.

- Yeah, when the corn is ready and then we know then the skin is peeling and everything looks okay, so we can grind it. So before that, we're gonna rinse it, but really, really little. We don't want to remove everything we gain with the nixtamalization.

- Luke: Mm-hmm.

- Is to rinse it, remove some of the excess of the water. And now we're gonna bring it here to the grinder. This is a traditional Mexican grinder especially for masa. Yeah, there's two volcanic stones, and one of the stones rotates, and then it's gonna start, like, pulverizing the corn. And then from the ends of the stone, you're gonna see, like, the masa flying away.

- Sure, so this is still, even though this is slightly more automated, this is still a very, very tactile process.

- Yeah.

- Like you have to touch it, you have to be involved with it. You have to sharpen it.

- Oh, absolutely, yeah.

- Okay, wow.

- Yeah, I think it's kinda like what, like, Mexican cuisine is. You know, it's a lot of, there's no recipes. It's all like, oh, how it feel, and then you taste it and add a little salt and little peppers, you know, but you don't have, like, a perfect recipe. It's hard to get a recipe from your grandma, for example. They never will tell you exactly how to do it.
[Luke laughs]

- Exactly.

- Ah, okay, now that we have the corn here and everything is ready, we have the grinder set up. Just gonna add a little water.

- Okay.

- And I'm gonna turn around; it's gonna be loud.

- Luke: Okay.
[machine roaring]

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- We wanna make a ball to hold all the heat. The other thing with masa, it's a little delicate, so we can't let it in atmosphere for too long because it's gonna start getting dry. When it's fresh, we just bring it to the tortilla machine and we start working right away. So this is the tortilla machine, this is a feeder. We make this work as a feeder, so we just dump the masa and then you'll see what happen next.

- Luke: I can't wait.

- Julian: Okay, now I wanna create a curtain here, a layer of masa. When this is ready, I can start using the cutter to get the tortilla.

- Luke: Tortillas come down the conveyor. They do almost a full revolution on this top, like, griddle or comal, and then they get kind of pushed off the side to a second layer, where it flips, and it gets the other side to set all of those starches and proteins, and the entire process becomes much, much clearer.

- Julian: Yeah, yeah, what this does is to simulate a handmade tortilla, which you would've flipped three times.

- Oh, my gosh, this is so cool. Wow, I can't believe how much the smell and, like, the sensory of the tortilla has changed since we went through the corn and, like, grinding it to this. It's, it's beautiful. That is so good. That is so good. How many tortillas do you usually produce in a day?

- Wow, a lot.
[Luke laughs]

Yeah, yeah, over like 5,000, I think.

- Over 5,000?

- Sometimes, yeah.

- Luke: The thing that surprises me is that tortillas are often thought of as, like, this small, kinda bread-like component, but not much thought goes into how they get from the corn to right here. And this is one of those processes that takes care, time, attention, and love.

- Julian: Yeah.

- Luke: It's kind of intentionally inefficient. You have to have people who care about it so much that they're willing to work through the entire process and the mechanisms therein to make something that's so impactful that when it goes on the table, people notice it and then it becomes part of the process. It's actually gorgeous.

- Yeah. We take really serious tortillas in Mexico. It's practically the most important calorie intake. And we eat, like, with each meal, breakfast, lunch, dinner, we're always eating tortilla. So we need to have good quality tortilla.

- I love it, and you're bringing it to Wisconsin, and that is, like, my favorite part, man.

- Thank you. Oh, thanks so much for coming.

- Thank you so much. Of course, brother.

- Mí casa es su casa.

- Gracias, amigo! Mí también! All right, I'm on my way to the Owl Farm to make some carne asada tacos. But I need to take a pit stop and see my favorite butcher, David Gathy, in Madison. I'm hoping that David can talk me through the differences between using flank steak and skirt steak for these tacos. And I can walk away with a better understanding of how to make these sing to live up to the tortillas. David Gathy!

- Yes, sir.

- How's it going?

- Great, how are you?

- Great. I found myself in this situation where I wanna be able to prepare carne asada.

- Sure, sure.

- I wanted to come talk to you first.

- Yeah, absolutely.

- So for carne asada, talk me through my options.

- So here we have a whole skirt steak.

- Ooh, I like that fat.

- Yeah, it's really nice on there. The preferred method that I like is a butterflied, more grooves, more edges for that char, you know.

- Sure. You're so fancy, Gathy. It's so great.

- I'm all right. And then, finally, we have the flank steak, nice, lean. A little thicker, can be butterflied. Always cut against the grain. And as all these, I would just chop it up after I grill it.

- Okay.

- Yep.

- Pros, cons, I can already see the amount of fat on the skirt in comparison to this really lean flank. And I know that fat equals flavor.

- Yeah, 100%, 100%.

- Right? But if we're gonna marinate this and we're gonna, you know, what are some of the attributes of a piece of meat that I might wanna look at, if I know that it's gonna be marinated heavily?

- Yeah, honestly, what I look for is the grooves. It's gonna absorb more, hold more. Yeah, as we come to the butterflied skirt steak, I like the edges, I like the grooves, I like the char bits that it produces. And then you have a regular skirt steak, which doesn't have as much, but still very nice. This is obviously gonna be a quicker cook because it's butterflied. Few minutes a side on extremely high heat will do it justice.

- And with asada, we don't necessarily want that to be, you know, a medium rare. We want that to be, like, on and off.

- 100%, yep.

- Okay.

- And like I said, the end goal for me personally with asada is chopping it into little pieces so that you don't have the pull of both of these steaks.

- Yeah.

- Sometimes, when you go in for a bite, you can pull a lot of the ingredients out because it has that pull, but chopping that up kind of eliminates that.

- Cool, well, I will take the grooviest piece of meat you got that's chopped.

- Yeah, I got you.

- And I can't wait to give this a shot.

- Amazing, yeah.

- Awesome, thanks David.

- David: Look forward to it, yeah.
[upbeat music]

- My friend.

- Hey, thank you so much, David.

- Yes, sir.

- I appreciate you and this place immensely.

- Appreciate that, thank you so much.

- Have a good day, man.

- Take care, my friend.
[gentle music]

- So we have these beautiful blue corn tortillas from Tortilleria Zepeda in Lone Rock, Wisconsin. 

And one of the things I found myself asking as we were going through the tortilleria was what kind of tacos would really speak to me with these artisan heirloom grains? And I came to one of my favorite tacos, which is asada. Asada in its essence is skirt steak in this instance or flank steak, and that's been marinated. And the thing about making asada is that you really want a marinade that packs the flavor in. 

So today, we're gonna start by creating that marinade and, at the same time, creating a salsa to be able to put on the finished product. 

Let's get started. So we've got our food processor, and one of the first things I wanna do is get those chilies. So right here over the fire, I've been slowly smoking and allowing these chilies to kinda warm up. They've blistered a little bit, but they're nice and dried out and ready for this matcha. So now that we've got our chilies in here, let's add just a little bit of the sesame. And we want this to be kinda the flavorful base of that matcha. And remember, this has just a little bit of citrus added to it in that yuzu. So it's gonna add a little bit of its own punch. 

And then we're gonna take some of our dehydrated ramps. Just something to give us a little essence of springtime and the forest of Wisconsin, and also give us a little bit of a base for that allium, that onion and garlic flavor that we love so much. The essence of springtime in the forest in Wisconsin. 

Now that I've got those in, I'm gonna season with just a little bit of black pepper, a little salt, and a splash of vinegar. In a lot of instances, apple cider vinegar is the preferred, but for the purposes of this cooking exercise, we have a little tomato vinegar from the garden. I'm gonna add just a couple teaspoons of this to give it some of that sprightliness. 

Now I'm gonna take my sunflower oil. Nut oil, seed oils, hazelnuts, these are all specialty crops from Wisconsin. And I just wanna make sure that we get representation in every single layer of this dish. Mmm, already, that smells so good. So one of the last things I'm gonna do is I'm gonna add a little bit of lime juice. So what I'm going to do is I'm gonna have my lime here and give it a squeeze right into the processor. Oh, yeah, raining down that beautiful lime flavor. I'm gonna give it one more pulse and add just a little bit more of that sunflower oil. 

One of the things with asada is we really wanna ensure that these flavors get the chance to know each other. So my recommendation is being able to take this asada to marinate it and let it sit, whether it's for an hour, whether for it's a night, or maybe in the circumstance of a big party, you might want this to marinate for a couple days to take up all that delicious flavor. 

And so now that I've got all these flavors on the outside of this marinade, I'm gonna actually add and accent that marinade by adding the juice of one more lime. There's something about limes over beef with wood smoke coming up from the back of the grill. It just gets me going. 

Accent with a little bit of salt. And now black pepper. Mmm. Now that I got my gloves ready, I'm gonna take and just rub on all this marinade, get all that flavor packed in there. And you can see this skirt steak. 

One of the reasons we love this is it's so permeated with fat. That fat equals flavor. And it's also gonna lend itself to grilling up nice and quick, which is awesome. This is not the type of steak that you are gonna wanna serve raw or medium rare or even medium. You want this to be cooked almost all the way through. What I wanna do next is make sure that my grill is nice and hot, and make sure that this beef gets a good cooking. 

We're gonna take this beautiful skirt steak. Man, look at that. One of the other things about making asada that's really awesome too is the fact that skirt steak is usually not that expensive. So you can really affordably feed a family with this beautiful cut of meat and really let those flavors shine. 

While we're waiting for our beef to finish up, and we want that to be cooked all the way through, it's time to introduce the star of the show again, our tortillas. These are the blue corn tortillas from Tortilleria Zepeda. That delicious masa. You get a little bit of that lime, all that goodness. And it smells so comforting, so delicious. 

These tortillas can stand up to a lot. So what I'm going to do is pull 'em apart here and I'm gonna gently kiss 'em over the heat. And what that'll do is it'll soften the tortillas and make 'em more pliable, but then also bring out that big corn flavor that we really want. Oh, yeah, now that these tortillas are soft and pliable, they've been steamed, a little bit of that water that's inside them. It's ready to be wrapped up in a clean towel. 

And we're gonna wait now and pull that beef off. Yum, yeah. Look at this meaty boy. This is grilled all the way through. We've allowed that fat to melt down on the inside. It's rendered out. This is ready for some of those tortillas. So when we go to actually cut the beef, we wanna ensure that we cut against the grain. And the reason we do that is for a lot of these cuts, like the flank or the skirt, they're very, very tightly grained because they are on the side of the ribcage. We wanna ensure that we break that grain up to give us a nice soft texture instead of something that's gonna chew and snap back at us. 

Oh, so now we're gonna take this beautifully steamed tortilla, and I'm gonna start with the salsa matcha. 

Come down with a nice smear. Oh, yeah, that's good. So this cheese actually is a Mexican-style cheese. Fortunately for us, the master cheesemaker there has his roots in Wisconsin. Now that we've got our Mexican cheese on there, here goes our asada, and we're gonna get some of these pickled red onions. And last but not least, just a few sprigs of cilantro. 

The smell of this is, I mean, it's farfetched quite frankly to take these Wisconsin ingredients and be able to be transported into another location somewhere in the world. But knowing that you're still supporting your friends and neighbors, who are the farmers and food producers, is over the top. 

You get the brightness of the corn in the tortilla. You get that simple, smooth elegance of the cheese. You get that beautiful smokiness in the marinade of the beef, the levity of the onions and the cilantro, all to create, in my opinion, an almost perfect bite. Tacos make me a happy boy. And I'm so glad that I found a way to incorporate the hard work of my friends and neighbors into my taco game that can be enjoyed any day and every day as far as I'm concerned. It doesn't just have to be Tuesdays anymore.
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- Luke: Wisconsin Foodie would like to thank the following underwriters.
[gentle guitar music]

- The dairy farmers of Wisconsin are proud to underwrite Wisconsin Foodie, and remind you that in Wisconsin, we dream in cheese.
[people cheering]

Just look for our badge. It's on everything we make.

- Did you know Organic Valley protects over 400,000 acres of organic farmland? So are we an organic food cooperative that protects land or land conservationists who make delicious food? Yes, yes, we are. Organic Valley.
[lively banjo music]

- Employee-owned New Glarus Brewing Company has been brewing and bottling beer for their friends, only in Wisconsin, since 1993. Just a short drive from Madison, come visit "Swissconsin" and see where your beer's made.

- Wisconsin's great outdoors has something for everyone. Come for the adventure, stay for the memories. Go wild in Wisconsin. To build your adventure, visit dnr.wi.gov.

- Twenty-minute commutes. Weekends on the lake. Warm welcomes and exciting career opportunities. Not to mention all the great food! There's a lot to look forward to in Wisconsin. Learn more at InWisconsin.com.

- With additional support coming from The Conscious Carnivore. From local animal sourcing to on-site, high-quality butchering and packaging, The Conscious Carnivore can ensure organically raised, grass-fed, and healthy meats through its small group of local farmers. The Conscious Carnivore: Know your farmer, love your butcher.

- Luke: Additional support from the following underwriters. Also with the support of Friends of PBS Wisconsin.
[gentle music]