The Secret Ingredient: Masa Harina

And an end-of-the year roundup of favorite food writers

I tend to tell people that I’ve spent the past five years diligently putting distance between myself and the Internet. My whole career up until 2020 was extremely online — building my own startup in the early 2010s and then working for others, while continuing to express myself through arty little apps and projects. I left all of that because it was feeling increasingly unreal, while the making of food and IRL events/spaces was how I actually wanted to connect with people.

What’s funny is that through making and writing about food I’ve found myself still very much online, but connecting to different people (who — sorry! — are much more interesting to me). Substack is a sadly Regrettable Platform and I’m not fond of Patreon as a product, but there’s something like a community of food writers who have gathered here and whose ideas and recipes are bouncing off each other in a wonderfully inspiring entanglement. My inbox is my greatest source of inspiration for what to cook these days, and as I inevitably modify other people’s recipes to meet my tastes, I feel as if I’m in conversation with them (and often literally am) through flavor and texture and ingredients.

So before we get into my Secret Ingredient interview with Teresa Finney — a baker in Atlanta I would probably have never come into contact with outside of this scene — I wanted to shout out some of my other favorite writers and recipe developers. Some have paywalled content, some keep things mostly free, but it’s the holiday season and why not throw a few bucks to any of these brilliant, passionate writers, or gift newsletter subscriptions to your friends this year?

Gan Chin Lin over on Patreon is top of my mind lately, because I’ve been playing with her buttered toast digestive biscuit recipe — her recipe is great, but once I started adding buckwheat flour and cocoa powder, my biscuits are becoming something different. I think I first learned about her through Andrew Janjigian’s excellent newsletter Wordloaf, which continues to teach me about bread and flour and little tips like making my own pan release coating. Sarah Owens is a sourdough/whole-grain baker and another incredible font of grain knowledge (I took one of her online classes last winter and she could straight lecture about grains for 2 hours every session). And Nicola Lamb, whose newsletter Kitchen Projects gathered enough momentum to turn into a cookbook, is not only my first stop for research into a new baked good, but has created community through projects like her Gift Exchange that remind me of my early time on the Internet.

Jenn de la Vega is a friend IRL, but I think I was reading her before I knew her, and I’ve been particularly interested in some of her recent posts sharing her insider knowledge about the black box of cookbook publishing. Alicia Kennedy was probably my first Substack follow, and her ideas and book recommendations continue to shape my thinking. Lukas Volger just shares the cooking recipes that I most want to eat, period (I must share some part of my tasting brain with him). Christina Chaey has a lovely warm voice over at Gentle Foods that makes you feel the exact opposite of the way you do scrolling Instagram. Julia Turshen does a terrific job of going beyond recipes with her lists and charts, online classes, and generally good advice (about cooking, about thinking about food, about living).

And finally we’re back to Teresa Finney! I met her online through Jenn when I was writing this post about the problem with recipes on the Internet, because she wrote an excellent piece of her own on the topic. She frequently gives voice to the difficulties that many of us share in writing and running a small food business in a system that is stacked against these things. Meanwhile, the way she pours herself into her cottage bakery At Heart Panaderia is really inspiring. When she says in our interview, “I couldn’t be doing any other job,” I completely resonate with this feeling about work. She’s also written about the disruptive power of self-publishing, and is publishing her own cooking zine that looks gorgeous and I can’t wait to receive.

Teresa is about to get you hyped on masa harina, so open Masienda in another tab and start reimagining your favorite baked goods with a little bit of tortilla flavor.

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Definitely masa harina. I think anybody who knows At Heart would expect me to choose it because I use it in cakes, I use it in cookies, I use it in conchas. I grew up with it — every Christmas Eve, my family would have these giant tamale making parties. So that was my first experience — the smell, the taste of it. It was such a special thing to me growing up to have the whole family under my grandparents’ roof, doing the same thing. Those parties were a foundation for me and the food I would end up making.

I was supposed to go home in the spring of 2020, and then [when the pandemic happened], I was like, I don’t know when I'm going to be able to see my family again. So let me do the next best thing, which is work with this ingredient that reminded me of being a kid at my grandparents’ house. I started to make conchas and they kind of took off, because here in Atlanta, especially, there's not a lot of Mexican bakeries. And I thank the masa for taking it there, because I think the majority of people were used to conchas that were kind of dry and here I was using extremely good butter and extremely good masa harina.

At the beginning I was just using Maseca, which is like the industrialized form of masa harina, probably the easiest to source. And then I discovered Masienda, and I’ve learned tons from them. Their product is extremely superior, in the freshness, the scent, and the taste of course. They have blue corn, they have red corn as well, which I love. So I started a relationship with them — I think what happened was they reached out to me to do some freelance recipe development and started sending me stuff.

K: Had you ever had other sweet baked goods that use masa harina this way?

I think there are some sweets, like something in Brazil, that use it but I don’t know if I’d ever had it before. I’m not sure what inspired me to start putting it in cakes, but I'm glad I did, because it’s what people have come to expect from me. I think it sets me apart from other bakeries.

K: Yeah, I think a lot about the way people develop their aesthetic in cooking, and in baking especially. My favorite bakers have their own distinct styles, and you can see that in everything they make.

For me it just seemed like a no-brainer. Like, I'm making this cake, so I'm gonna put some masa harina in it, that makes sense to me. And I actually wasn't expecting people to get it. A lot of people say that the cakes taste like cornbread, and I think for the majority that’s how it’s best for them to understand it, through cornbread. The masa harina can make things kind of dense, but I tend to use just a small amount of it because I like to have a background flavor rather than a pronounced flavor. For the most part, people seem to have embraced it, so I'm thrilled about that. It’s been cool to see people expand their palates.

K: Were you baking professionally before starting At Heart?

So I’ve always baked, that’s been the one constant in my life. But baking was never something I thought I could do for work. I didn't go to culinary school. I worked in a bakery when I was 22 but front-of-house, so I never had hands-on training. A lot of the stuff I've learned has been self-taught, through books, through blogs, that kind of thing.

I always knew that if I decided to become a baker that I wasn't going to make any money at it. But then 2020 happened, and I was like, Well, fuck. I was working at Kroger and I lost my job, and I needed to do something, right? So I was like, let me just try. Let's see what happens. And from there, it's taken off. I don't think I could do any other kind of job at this point. It’s been four years, and I can’t quit this, even when I’m tired, even when I’m like, I cannot think about cake right now. This is still my baby. This is something I'm going to be doing for the rest of my life.

K: I think that sometimes if you think about something too hard or go the traditional route of making a business plan, you’d never do it.

Yeah, I think doing things nontraditionally is what gave me the confidence to start. If I’d actually sat down and put things on paper, I would have been too scared. A lot of bakeries are barely scraping by. But at the end of the day, this is the first job I've had in my life where I feel like I'm contributing something — not just cakes and food, but actually creating a space for people to come out, to eat good food, hang out.

But I’m also 40 now and my body has been through the wringer in the last four years. It’s so physically exhausting. Since September, I've been doing a weekly pop-up with a cafe here, so I'll bake from home and then pack everything up and sell there. But I’m tired of baking from home exclusively, so I’m trying to suss out the pathways for me to have a very tiny space. I would love to be able to leave the house for the day for work, and then come home and not have to think, Oh God, I have to make this cake tonight. The popups are coming to an end on the 21st, and then I have to think about what's next for At Heart.

I'm so thankful for this ingredient, because it opened up this world to me. I don't know that I would have felt quite as excited about it if I hadn't been experimenting with masa harina and driven by this curiosity about how the ingredient would work in a cake. I definitely think this is the reason the bakery has been so successful.

K: But it also sounds like there’s so much of your taste in it. It’s such a rare and difficult thing — to trust your own instincts, to start a business, to trust your own taste and believe that other people will appreciate it. Where do you think this confidence comes from in you?

I don’t know. I think I’ve had the audacity to just try things and allowed myself the space to fuck up. I think any success I've had has come from me kind of being delusional and having the audacity to try something and trust that if I think it's good, so will other people.

I definitely have a lot of confidence in my own taste. I couldn’t really tell you where that comes from. It's always been something that I felt, I've always had faith in myself and my taste and my baking.

K: Anything new you want to experiment with next?

I would love to make more breads. I would love to use masa for bread as well, which is something I've seen people do. I’ve tried it and it’s amazing — it tastes kind of like if you were to heat up a tortilla and spread some butter on it. I just feel like I need to get right with my sourdough first.

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