Last night we ate pinto beans simmered in red chili with ham for dinner. I decided to add homemade masa, having the most gorgeous white corn, slacked lime, and extra time at hand. I had a vague notion of the recipe--which I double checked online. And then I just jumped into the pot. Never worked with lime before and it seemed a bit scary. But certainly not scarier than lye, which I've sloshed around this house in the most cavalier and horrifying way. So, into the pot we went.

When you drop white corn into lime the color changes almost instantly. The whole pot turned vivid bright yellow, an artificial and shocking sight at first. Dumping your food into a pot of lime is, perhaps, a counter-intuitive thing to do. Do we call ancient food techniques artificial processing? Anyhooo, the point is, BAM, you get very yellow corn. Why? I don't know. The chemical situation in the pot makes the corn a lot more nutritious (and yummy). I tried to capture the color by comparison to a lemon, but couldn't make my camera pick it up. It looked as yellow as the fruit.

I can not tell you how it tasted though. After everything was simmering nicely, I sat down to reread all the instructions. Which might seem like due diligence but is really a way of gloating--reliving the fun and glory of what was just done. Which was a great feeling. Right up to my realization that the recipe specifies dried corn. I began surfing many masa recipes for comparison and googling "fresh corn" plus masa or nixtamalization. Which is an ungooglable phrase because "fresh corn" is nearly as common on the internet as it is on southern porches, even when listed next to abuelita's masa.

Turns out, you can not nixtamalize fresh corn, only dried corn. The entire gorgeous perfect lovely bright pot was dumped down the drain. Then we ate our beans for dinner and went out for pints of ice cream. Sort of a lose-win, really.