Re: Toxic Tortillas?
Posted: Tue Nov 19, 2019 7:26 am
On the bright side, I was reading several studies about how mycotoxins can be greatly reduced by pressure cooking, if you'd rather make a tamale. It isn't totally foolproof, but is probably a safer way to cook this kind of stuff. Well, they say that electric pressure cookers aren't as reliable for food safety, because they don't necessarily stay as hot as the traditional pressure cookers. This could be one reason there are mixed results using those for cooking the mycotoxin-contaminated food, in the studies (they didn't always say what kind of pressure cooker it was, or the altitude involved). Not that it made things any worse than cooking to a lesser extent, I just wouldn't be so confident as for eating a lot of one ingredient, whether or not it's said to be prone to that kind of contamination (it gets into just about everything to some extent). Anyway, it was also interesting to read about tamales: "For nearly two thousand years the main use of nixtamal was the preparation of tamale. Tortillas were a much later development that occurred at ~900 a. C. and became the principal form of nixtamal consumption and the center of the Mesoamerican diet"...
Tamales weren't found to be inherently safer in the Guatemalan diet though, I'm just thinking that since they are prepared by steaming corn flour, then pressure cooking at higher temperatures could be most appropriate for that kind of recipe, instead of tortillas and chips (although they say that frying reduces mycotoxins to some extent in tortilla chips).
Tamales weren't found to be inherently safer in the Guatemalan diet though, I'm just thinking that since they are prepared by steaming corn flour, then pressure cooking at higher temperatures could be most appropriate for that kind of recipe, instead of tortillas and chips (although they say that frying reduces mycotoxins to some extent in tortilla chips).
