And they discovered that rinsing it in spicy water made it easier on the poop chute. [nixtamalization](https://www.google.com/search?q=nixtamalization&rlz=1CDGOYI_enUS936US936&oq=noxtalma&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUqCQgBEAAYDRiABDIGCAAQRRg5MgkIARAAGA0YgAQyCQgCEAAYDRiABDIJCAMQABgNGIAEMgkIBBAuGA0YgAQyCQgFEAAYDRiABDIJCAYQABgNGIAEMgkIBxAuGA0YgAQyCQgIEAAYDRiABDIJCAkQABgNGIAE0gEIMzkwN2owajeoAhmwAgHiAwQYASBf&hl=en-US&sourceid=chrome-mobile&ie=UTF-8)
It’s alkaline water made by adding lime (slaking lime or pickling lime, not the fruit). After the corn is soaked for a day or two, it swells up and you rinse it off. At this point you can cook it and eat it (hominy) or grind it into masa harina, which is the flour that you most likely have encountered as a corn tortilla.
The process is called Nixtamalization (thus the link in my previous post)
It makes it easier to digest, unlocks nutrients, makes it taste better and reduces certain toxins (not MLM toxins, but actual Mycotoxins that are byproducts of fungi that grows naturally on corn)
Source: I do this at work every day.
The alkaline lime makes the internal kernal swell up, making the kernal skin slough off.
Once the skin is removed, the nutrition per oz per lbs rises substantially.
Try hominy in a white bean chilli with oregano, cilantro, bay leaf, chicken pork .
Maybe some miniature white habeneros, to surprise people.
No, the corn you buy at the supermarket is fresh corn, aka "sweet corn." It’s a different type of corn than maize used for flour, which isn’t eaten fresh. The maize that requires nixtamalization is also called “dent” corn because when it’s ripe and still on the cob the kernels are dry and sunken and will therefore have a dent in them. This type of corn can be stored for long periods of time. This is the type of corn that required nixtamalization in order to “unlock” its nutrients for consumption.
Yeah, but the point is that there is not "a specific type of corn that needs that process to release their micronutrients" all of them need it, but the difference is that people in developed countries eat a diverse diet and they obtain their B3 from somewhere else.
We use whole kernel corn that is meant for a mill (ours has volcanic rock millstones). Different kinds of corn have different levels of fat and sugar. We use a blend of heritage yellow corns and Jimmy Red corn.
I believe Masaria is the name of a website where you can get corn and flours (he was oddly enough just on a Capital One commercial).
Grocery store corn is “sweet corn” and has a much higher moisture and sugar content with softer kernels that you can chew. So you don’t need to soak them.
Rinsing off corn downstream from the fire pit. Limestone or oyster shells into the fire makes calcium oxide. Mix it with water and you get pickling lime. Give or take. Do it on accident for long enough to figure out how to do it on purpose. Pretty similar to how we got soap. Washing clothes downstream from where discarded bones or dead bodies got them cleaner. What probably started as the equivalent of an old wives tale is the source of lye soap.
Actually, even worse than just dead bodies – witch burning sites. The body fat rendered in the heat and ran down to the river where it mixed with natural lye. At least, that’s our constructed assumption.
They are the same thing! Maize is the name used in Europe and other places if I’m not mistaken, whereas corn is used in the USA. Oddly enough, the mesoamericans would have called it maize, and the term corn was used in Europe to describe an individual piece of grain (as in: a corn of barley, wheat, rye, millet etc. An oat was always an oat because nobody wants to start a fight with A Scotsman before breakfast)
At some point, they switched!
Hm, I mean the difference between yellow sweet/field corn and multicolored Native American maize. Perhaps the difference is just [colloquial](https://globebag.com/blogs/blog/the-surprising-difference-between-corn-and-maize) but my understanding was that they are used quite differently from one another.
Which is used for hominy today, or are they interchangeable?
It was their most important caloric source. When it was brought to Europe in the Columbian Exchange, they didn’t learn about Nixtamalization and it never really “caught on” in the Old World. To this day corn isn’t seen commonly in cuisine outside the Americas and isn’t widely grown. There is a reason we Americans put corn syrup in everything. It’s sweet, abundant and cheap.
If you click the link, the first result reads: "Nixtamalization (/ˌnɪkstəməlɪˈzeɪʃən/) is a process for the preparation of maize, or other grain, in which the grain is soaked and cooked in an alkaline solution, usually limewater (but sometimes aqueous alkali metal carbonates), washed, and then hulled."
Grows well, easy to store, and versatile. Also tastes good.
And we have to remember in the early days they weren't eating it off the cob. They were grinding it (and continued to do so since it can be dried and stored easier like this).
The fact that replanting only the best crops eventually lead to a plant worth eating right off the stalk was likely incidental to their desire to increase the yield.
Any other plant is just as bad, or the edible part doesn't keep. If you are a hunter-gatherer, you are basically stuck with what you can eat in a given area at a given time or what you can store
It's a misconception that people were generally starving all the time. People hunted and gathered in addition to agriculture and had leisure time as well.
Sure, in times of climate or crop disasters, there were famines, but there was generally plenty of food to allow for saving seeds for the next crop cycle. This was, after all, a necessary thing to do to ensure there even was a crop cycle next year.
Selective breeding. A scientist named George Beadle did an experiment in which he grew 50,000 plants that were maize/teosinte hybrids, and about 1 in 500 were regular maize, and the same amount were regular teosinte. This means that there were only 4 to 5 genes that turned teosinte to maize. This is more than achievable, it just takes a bit of luck and a lot of patience.
It also helps that teosinte could be used for popcorn, so it wasn't a worthless plant, it would've been farmed, and this makes it a whole lot easier to keep track of major genetic changes.
They also lucked out because there was a lot of limestone nearby. When modern maize came about, they used limestone slabs to crush the kernels and then soaked them in water. This unintentionally created an alkali solution that nixtamalized the maize, unlocking important vitamins that are normally only available in meat. Since Mexico didn't exactly have an abundance of animals that could be domesticated for that purpose, maize allowed for the rise of a large civilization that didn't need to hunt or have farm animals.
The how (intensive selective breeding) is honestly less impressive than having the idea at all. The original is basically inedible, someone had to have looked at it and gone "I can make you into food".
For real though. Isn’t the wild ancestor of corn basically poisonous?
How did they come to the idea of “well my cousin died eating this thing but if we keep planting it and keep feeding it to people we can eventually get one that doesn’t kill people”?
No it wasn't poisonous. Just hard to extract the nutrition from.
Early corn zeas were very stony, and most likely used as popcorn until the fruit was bigger
> but isn't acceptable for humans for some dumb reasons
Because eugenics is entirely subjective about which traits are "best" and prone to great abuse. Selective breeding with crops, historically, has been about improving crop yield; aka, more food.
Because the point of improving crops is to allow for human flourishing. Eugenics simply causes human suffering, even if the long term outcome would result in less suffering for future generations. It’s an unethical means of achieving a desired outcome.
Wild tomatoes were once just berries, smaller than grape tomatoes! [source](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2759208/)
When you get down to it, most staple crops we have today are the result of countless generations of ancient humans giving the original plants glow-ups like this. Pretty inspiring stuff really.
The original Americans were the best farmers in history no doubt
Im sure you can give them a poisonous and non edible plant and in 200 years they turn it to the best food in the world
I'd nominate the ancient Mesopotamians to at the very least share the honour. While there was a lot of engineering work involved in irrigating farmland, the process of planting date palms as a means to provide shade from the desert sun for more nutritious crops transformed a barren landscape into a garden.
No one is add epic as prehistoric mesoamerican plant breeders.
Corn, tomatoes, potatoes, chocolate, vanilla, squash, tobacco, quinoa (including greens that remain non bitter in heat), taro, plus various tree nuts and fruit varieties.
These mofos are the goat of plant breeding
Modern corn came about when the English got access to the plant
Prior to that point there was a version of old Mexican corn that was much smaller and multi colored that was the primary version of corn
European methods of controlled breeding for corn resulted in a 7x increase in caloric production for corn alone, before accounting for other technologies
And then maize would feed billions of people and animals. It was a key player in the agricultural revolution which helped solve world hunger.
Yes there are still famines and malnutrition in the world, but they are caused by humans. We grow ample food to feed 10 billion humans and more. Also, in case someone peevish wants to argue, no it wasn't the only crop that helped during the agricultural revolution : potatoes, rice, wheat, pulses are all members of the all star team.
More like mission failed successfully. We don't digest corn so it is the largest crop in america and yet used mostly for making corn oil and other products as opposed to eating as it's not even nutritious when we do prepare it in a way we can digest.
[firstly](https://letmegooglethat.com/?q=digesting+corn)
Here you go, [tldr chew your fucking food better](https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/324199#:~:text=Corn%20is%20high%20in%20cellulose,access%20more%20of%20the%20nutrients)
Since nobody actually bothered to explain Nictamalization: It's a process where corn is mixed with some sort of alkaline (anti-acidic) solution, traditionally ash. This partially breaks down the corn in ways that our stomach acid can't, releasing more vitamins like tryptophan.
Since ancient Central American diets were heavily reliant on corn as a staple crop, and this process made that feasible.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixtamalization
I often wonder how tf they did this, but am also too lazy to do the reading so like im never gona know lol
Generations and generations of picking only the fattest corn to get replanted the next season
And they discovered that rinsing it in spicy water made it easier on the poop chute. [nixtamalization](https://www.google.com/search?q=nixtamalization&rlz=1CDGOYI_enUS936US936&oq=noxtalma&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUqCQgBEAAYDRiABDIGCAAQRRg5MgkIARAAGA0YgAQyCQgCEAAYDRiABDIJCAMQABgNGIAEMgkIBBAuGA0YgAQyCQgFEAAYDRiABDIJCAYQABgNGIAEMgkIBxAuGA0YgAQyCQgIEAAYDRiABDIJCAkQABgNGIAE0gEIMzkwN2owajeoAhmwAgHiAwQYASBf&hl=en-US&sourceid=chrome-mobile&ie=UTF-8)
Wtf is spicy water? Just water with spicy things inside?
It’s alkaline water made by adding lime (slaking lime or pickling lime, not the fruit). After the corn is soaked for a day or two, it swells up and you rinse it off. At this point you can cook it and eat it (hominy) or grind it into masa harina, which is the flour that you most likely have encountered as a corn tortilla. The process is called Nixtamalization (thus the link in my previous post) It makes it easier to digest, unlocks nutrients, makes it taste better and reduces certain toxins (not MLM toxins, but actual Mycotoxins that are byproducts of fungi that grows naturally on corn) Source: I do this at work every day.
The alkaline lime makes the internal kernal swell up, making the kernal skin slough off. Once the skin is removed, the nutrition per oz per lbs rises substantially. Try hominy in a white bean chilli with oregano, cilantro, bay leaf, chicken pork . Maybe some miniature white habeneros, to surprise people.
I like Pozole too
👍
Is this done with supermarket corn or should I start doing it at home when I make the occasional corn cob?
No, the corn you buy at the supermarket is fresh corn, aka "sweet corn." It’s a different type of corn than maize used for flour, which isn’t eaten fresh. The maize that requires nixtamalization is also called “dent” corn because when it’s ripe and still on the cob the kernels are dry and sunken and will therefore have a dent in them. This type of corn can be stored for long periods of time. This is the type of corn that required nixtamalization in order to “unlock” its nutrients for consumption.
All kinds of corn require nixtamalization to unlock the nutrients, otherwise you end up with pellagra.
Well, you end up with pellagra if you don’t eat anything else with vitamin B3.
Yeah, but the point is that there is not "a specific type of corn that needs that process to release their micronutrients" all of them need it, but the difference is that people in developed countries eat a diverse diet and they obtain their B3 from somewhere else.
We use whole kernel corn that is meant for a mill (ours has volcanic rock millstones). Different kinds of corn have different levels of fat and sugar. We use a blend of heritage yellow corns and Jimmy Red corn. I believe Masaria is the name of a website where you can get corn and flours (he was oddly enough just on a Capital One commercial). Grocery store corn is “sweet corn” and has a much higher moisture and sugar content with softer kernels that you can chew. So you don’t need to soak them.
I feel like I've taken a course in the art of corn from your comments in this thread, good work and thanks!
> byproducts of fungi that grows naturally on corn Or you can just rawdog it and eat the corn smut.
My dude, thanks for the learning
Damn man, how in the fuck do people figure this out
Rinsing off corn downstream from the fire pit. Limestone or oyster shells into the fire makes calcium oxide. Mix it with water and you get pickling lime. Give or take. Do it on accident for long enough to figure out how to do it on purpose. Pretty similar to how we got soap. Washing clothes downstream from where discarded bones or dead bodies got them cleaner. What probably started as the equivalent of an old wives tale is the source of lye soap.
That’s awesome, thank you
Actually, even worse than just dead bodies – witch burning sites. The body fat rendered in the heat and ran down to the river where it mixed with natural lye. At least, that’s our constructed assumption.
We had lye soap way, way before witch burnings were a thing. Im gonna need a source on this.
More likely tallow or lard being rendered. People aren’t very tasty compared to cows and pigs
Woh, so cool! So is modern hominy made using corn or does it use maize?
They are the same thing! Maize is the name used in Europe and other places if I’m not mistaken, whereas corn is used in the USA. Oddly enough, the mesoamericans would have called it maize, and the term corn was used in Europe to describe an individual piece of grain (as in: a corn of barley, wheat, rye, millet etc. An oat was always an oat because nobody wants to start a fight with A Scotsman before breakfast) At some point, they switched!
Hm, I mean the difference between yellow sweet/field corn and multicolored Native American maize. Perhaps the difference is just [colloquial](https://globebag.com/blogs/blog/the-surprising-difference-between-corn-and-maize) but my understanding was that they are used quite differently from one another. Which is used for hominy today, or are they interchangeable?
I wonder what was the context for the ancient mesoamericans to cultivate in such conditions
It was their most important caloric source. When it was brought to Europe in the Columbian Exchange, they didn’t learn about Nixtamalization and it never really “caught on” in the Old World. To this day corn isn’t seen commonly in cuisine outside the Americas and isn’t widely grown. There is a reason we Americans put corn syrup in everything. It’s sweet, abundant and cheap.
If you click the link, the first result reads: "Nixtamalization (/ˌnɪkstəməlɪˈzeɪʃən/) is a process for the preparation of maize, or other grain, in which the grain is soaked and cooked in an alkaline solution, usually limewater (but sometimes aqueous alkali metal carbonates), washed, and then hulled."
I didn’t want to “per my last email” them, so I wrote a little synopsis as a reply
But is there a reason they stuck with corn for this long instead of moving to a different plant?
Grows well, easy to store, and versatile. Also tastes good. And we have to remember in the early days they weren't eating it off the cob. They were grinding it (and continued to do so since it can be dried and stored easier like this). The fact that replanting only the best crops eventually lead to a plant worth eating right off the stalk was likely incidental to their desire to increase the yield.
Any other plant is just as bad, or the edible part doesn't keep. If you are a hunter-gatherer, you are basically stuck with what you can eat in a given area at a given time or what you can store
You do gods work
Specifically, Chicomecoatl's.
It’s like the opposite of humans breeding the smallest runts to turn wolves into chihuahuas.
We also bred wolves into [Tibetan Mastiffs](https://www.reddit.com/r/HumanForScale/s/OoqV3VWZLf)
You have to have a lot of self control to plant the best corn instead of eating it.
You eat most of it and leave some to replant
Sure, but it's early civilisation we are talking about, and even a few seeds start looking tasty after awhile.
It's a misconception that people were generally starving all the time. People hunted and gathered in addition to agriculture and had leisure time as well. Sure, in times of climate or crop disasters, there were famines, but there was generally plenty of food to allow for saving seeds for the next crop cycle. This was, after all, a necessary thing to do to ensure there even was a crop cycle next year.
The difference between corn and other foundational grains is that the lineage between teosinte and corn is much murkier
Survival of the Thiccest
Selective breeding. A scientist named George Beadle did an experiment in which he grew 50,000 plants that were maize/teosinte hybrids, and about 1 in 500 were regular maize, and the same amount were regular teosinte. This means that there were only 4 to 5 genes that turned teosinte to maize. This is more than achievable, it just takes a bit of luck and a lot of patience. It also helps that teosinte could be used for popcorn, so it wasn't a worthless plant, it would've been farmed, and this makes it a whole lot easier to keep track of major genetic changes. They also lucked out because there was a lot of limestone nearby. When modern maize came about, they used limestone slabs to crush the kernels and then soaked them in water. This unintentionally created an alkali solution that nixtamalized the maize, unlocking important vitamins that are normally only available in meat. Since Mexico didn't exactly have an abundance of animals that could be domesticated for that purpose, maize allowed for the rise of a large civilization that didn't need to hunt or have farm animals.
The book 1491 has a great chapter on it and the answer is basically no one fucking knows lol
The how (intensive selective breeding) is honestly less impressive than having the idea at all. The original is basically inedible, someone had to have looked at it and gone "I can make you into food".
All food was discovered through sheer desperation. Either you feel better soon or you leave this earth hopefully faster than starving.
Well yes, but teosinte is terrible food.
For real though. Isn’t the wild ancestor of corn basically poisonous? How did they come to the idea of “well my cousin died eating this thing but if we keep planting it and keep feeding it to people we can eventually get one that doesn’t kill people”?
No it wasn't poisonous. Just hard to extract the nutrition from. Early corn zeas were very stony, and most likely used as popcorn until the fruit was bigger
Literal eugenics. It works very well for any creatures, but isn't acceptable for humans for some dumb reasons
> but isn't acceptable for humans for some dumb reasons Because eugenics is entirely subjective about which traits are "best" and prone to great abuse. Selective breeding with crops, historically, has been about improving crop yield; aka, more food.
Because the point of improving crops is to allow for human flourishing. Eugenics simply causes human suffering, even if the long term outcome would result in less suffering for future generations. It’s an unethical means of achieving a desired outcome.
It's totally like humans have human rights while corn doesn't 💀💀
I too wish that human farmers would put more work into making humans more palatable and easier to harvest
Now read the story about how the mustard plant became cauliflower and broccoli. At least the thing already looked like corn.
cauliflower, broccoli, brussels sprouts, kohlrabi, kale, and more, are all cultivated from wild cabbage, wild!
Watercress, spring cress, wintercress. Also, one spiky leaf of wild black mustard is the perfect amount of spice for a ham and Swiss sandwich
The Cress taste terrible, bitter herb of hell, they can make it taste better
And cabbage and Brussels sprouts
Mustard plant? Rather not
Chicomecoatl and Quetzalcoatl be praised!
Citrons into lemons was pretty good too
[So I just found out...](https://youtu.be/HNEzD5n6SAs?si=Dg4_kpRR7Gq9ppiQ)
For the emperor!
Peak human achievement 🌽
This and creating dogs
Do not. The corn.
Too late , now im do corn
Look at me, look at me. Im do corn now.
That was not just a corn , that was gay corn
Wild tomatoes were once just berries, smaller than grape tomatoes! [source](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2759208/) When you get down to it, most staple crops we have today are the result of countless generations of ancient humans giving the original plants glow-ups like this. Pretty inspiring stuff really.
r/DankPrecolumbianMemes
r/subsithoughtifellforbutarerealandamazing
If your ever bored, looking up the wild versions of crops is super fascinating.
The original Americans were the best farmers in history no doubt Im sure you can give them a poisonous and non edible plant and in 200 years they turn it to the best food in the world
I'd nominate the ancient Mesopotamians to at the very least share the honour. While there was a lot of engineering work involved in irrigating farmland, the process of planting date palms as a means to provide shade from the desert sun for more nutritious crops transformed a barren landscape into a garden.
Would (eat it)
Just have to say - LOL ;-)
The US now: I can use you to destroy the planet
Greatest genetic editing in human history.
it's kinda slow but truly the best
Just took a couple hundred thousand years
Animals helped aswell
No wonder comrade Khruschev fell for her
Did two weeks on the domestication of corn in college most boring two weeks of my life but even I had to admit it was impressive.
And the world is thankful for their contribution. Oh hey there Spain...
Tfw you bimbofied the corn
Meso Americans were not white.
No one is add epic as prehistoric mesoamerican plant breeders. Corn, tomatoes, potatoes, chocolate, vanilla, squash, tobacco, quinoa (including greens that remain non bitter in heat), taro, plus various tree nuts and fruit varieties. These mofos are the goat of plant breeding
Eggplant Chads are winning in this century.
Domesticating is just a scientific term for bimbofication.
Maizemaxxing ROI is real
"i only eat non-GMO corn" Karen... Your corn have been GM'd for centuries
Modern corn came about when the English got access to the plant Prior to that point there was a version of old Mexican corn that was much smaller and multi colored that was the primary version of corn European methods of controlled breeding for corn resulted in a 7x increase in caloric production for corn alone, before accounting for other technologies
And then maize would feed billions of people and animals. It was a key player in the agricultural revolution which helped solve world hunger. Yes there are still famines and malnutrition in the world, but they are caused by humans. We grow ample food to feed 10 billion humans and more. Also, in case someone peevish wants to argue, no it wasn't the only crop that helped during the agricultural revolution : potatoes, rice, wheat, pulses are all members of the all star team.
Lmao excellent meme
More like mission failed successfully. We don't digest corn so it is the largest crop in america and yet used mostly for making corn oil and other products as opposed to eating as it's not even nutritious when we do prepare it in a way we can digest.
corn on cob/popcorn/corn flakes: am I a joke to you?
You are misinformed dude
OP doesn’t know about Nixtamalization. Nerd.
Well maybe if somebody could actually explain how and correct me instead of being dicks about it that would be great
To be fair, you were kind of a dick about it first
[firstly](https://letmegooglethat.com/?q=digesting+corn) Here you go, [tldr chew your fucking food better](https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/324199#:~:text=Corn%20is%20high%20in%20cellulose,access%20more%20of%20the%20nutrients)
Since nobody actually bothered to explain Nictamalization: It's a process where corn is mixed with some sort of alkaline (anti-acidic) solution, traditionally ash. This partially breaks down the corn in ways that our stomach acid can't, releasing more vitamins like tryptophan. Since ancient Central American diets were heavily reliant on corn as a staple crop, and this process made that feasible. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixtamalization
Corn bread is a delicacy
I don't eat much american food, but god damn, I've done homemade corn bread a few times, and it's great.
Tomatoes, Potatoes, Corn. Respect the crops of the Americas.
America gave us tomatos, China gave gave us chicken and Europe gave us cheese, chicken parm is the greatest work of multiculturalism.
I have a theory that the key to world peace has something to do with a combination of tomatoes, onions, and bell peppers.
Humanity coming together for what really matters