Tomorrow night May 6th) at Don Artemio in Fort Worth, you can learn to make a tortilla the way it has been made in Mexico for eight thousand years. That’s not a figure of speech. Corn has been cultivated in Mexico since roughly 6000 BCE, and nixtamalization — the alkaline cooking process that transforms dried corn into masa — is one of the oldest food technologies in human history. The Mayan creation story says the first humans were formed from ground corn by the gods. That’s the thing on your plate.
On Wednesday, May 6, Don Artemio and La Fundación Tortilla present Maíz & Nixtamalization, a hands-on workshop and cultural experience led by Rafael Mier, founder and director of La Fundación Tortilla and author of Maíz: Origen, Cultura y Cocina. The class begins at 6 p.m. Tickets are $150 per person, plus tax and gratuity.
Mier is not a chef. He’s spent his career documenting heirloom corn varieties, regional growing practices, and the cultural traditions tied to Mexican corn agriculture — the kind of work that doesn’t get headlines but quietly keeps something irreplaceable from disappearing. He wrote the book on it, literally. When he talks about corn spreading from Mexico south to Patagonia and north to Canada, he’s not being dramatic. That migration is one of the most consequential things that ever happened to human food.
The workshop walks through nixtamalization from the beginning — how dried corn is soaked and cooked in an alkaline solution of water and calcium hydroxide, how that process unlocks nutrients that would otherwise be unavailable to the human body, and how the resulting masa becomes the foundation for tortillas, tamales, atole, and most of what we recognize as Mexican cooking. You’ll make tortillas by hand using heirloom corn and the same process Don Artemio’s kitchen uses every day. Then you eat them, as tacos, with a margarita.
Don Artemio is the right room for this. Chef Juan Ramón Cárdenas brought the restaurant from Saltillo, Mexico to Fort Worth in 2021, and his son Rodrigo — who trained at Tecnológico de Monterrey, the International Culinary Center in New York, and with Daniel Boulud’s Dinex Group — launched the restaurant’s own nixtamalization program that same year. The blue corn tortillas made here daily from heirloom ingredients are the product of that program, and they are a genuine reason to visit the restaurant on any given night. The James Beard Foundation has recognized Don Artemio for it. The restaurant is at 3268 W. 7th Street in Fort Worth’s Cultural District.
This is a one-night event and seats are limited. Tickets and reservations at donartemio.us. Let us know if you are attending!
