Tortilla in the context of "Unleavened bread"

Cornmeal is a meal (coarse flour) ground from dried maize. It is a common staple food and is ground to coarse, medium, and fine consistencies, but it is not as fine as wheat flour can be. In Mexico and Louisiana, very finely ground cornmeal is referred to as corn flour. When fine cornmeal is made from maize that has been soaked in an alkaline solution, e.g., limewater (a process known as nixtamalization), it is called masa harina (or masa flour), which is used for making arepas, tamales, and tortillas. Boiled cornmeal is called polenta in Italy and is also a traditional dish and bread substitute in Romania.

Old El Paso is a brand of Tex-Mex-style foods from American food producer General Mills. These include dinner kits, tacos and tortillas, taco seasoning, sauces, condiments, rice, and refried beans.

Old El Paso products are marketed across the globe. The brand is owned by General Mills. Pillsbury acquired it in 1995, when its then-parent company Grand Metropolitan bought Pet, Inc., which had itself taken over the brand in 1968 from the Mountain Pass Canning Company.

Latin American cuisine is the typical foods, beverages, and cooking styles common to many of the countries and cultures in Latin America. Latin America is a highly racially, ethnically, and geographically diverse with varying cuisines. Some items typical of Latin American cuisine include maize-based dishes arepas, empanadas, pupusas, tacos, tamales, tortillas and various salsas and other condiments (guacamole, pico de gallo, mole, chimichurri, chili, aji, pebre). Sofrito, a culinary term that originally referred to a specific combination of sautéed or braised aromatics, exists in Latin American cuisine. It refers to a sauce of tomatoes, roasted bell peppers, garlic, onions and herbs. Rice, corn, pasta, bread, plantain, potato, yucca, and beans are also staples in Latin American cuisine.

Latin American beverages are just as distinct as their foods. Some of the beverages predate colonization. Some popular beverages include coffee, mate, guayusa, hibiscus tea, horchata, chicha, atole, cacao and aguas frescas.

Maize flour or corn flour is a flour ground from dried maize (corn). It is a common staple food, and is ground to coarse, medium, and fine consistencies. Coarsely ground corn flour (meal) is known as cornmeal. When maize flour is made from maize that has been soaked in an alkaline solution, e.g., limewater (a process known as nixtamalization), it is called masa harina (or masa flour), which is used for making tamales and tortillas. Arepas are typically made from corn flour that has not been nixtamalized.

A comal is a smooth, flat griddle typically used in Mexico, Central America, and parts of South America, to cook tortillas and arepas, toast spices and nuts, sear meat, and generally prepare food. Similar cookware is called a budare in Venezuela. Some comals are concave and made of barro (clay). These are still made and used by the indigenous peoples of Mexico and Central America. Comals are similar to the American griddle or the Indian tawa, and are often used and named interchangeably with these.

Comals for home use are generally made from heavy cast iron, and sized to fit over either one burner on the stovetop (round) or two burners front to back (elongated oval). In many indigenous and pre-Hispanic cultures, the comal is handed down from grandmother to mother to daughter, the idea being that a comal tempered over many years of use will heat faster and cook cleaner.

Dent corn, also known as grain corn, is a type of field corn with a high soft starch content. It received its name because of the small indentation, or "dent", at the crown of each kernel on a ripe ear of corn. Reid's Yellow Dent is a variety developed by central Illinois farmer James L. Reid. Reid and his father, Robert Reid, moved from Brown County, Ohio, to Tazewell County, Illinois, in 1846 bringing with them a red corn variety known as "Johnny Hopkins", and crossed it with varieties of flint corn and flour corn. Most of today's hybrid corn varieties and cultivars are derived from it. This variety won a prize at the 1893 World's Fair.

Most of the corn grown in the United States today is yellow dent corn or a closely related variety derived from it. Dent corn is the variety used in food manufacturing as the base ingredient for cornmeal flour (used in the baking of cornbread), corn chips, tortillas, and taco shells. It is also used to make corn syrup. Starch derived from this high-starch content variety is turned into plastics, as well as fructose which is used as a sweetener (high-fructose corn syrup) in many processed foods and soft drinks.

Blue corn (also known as Hopi maize, Yoeme Blue, Tarahumara Maiz Azul, and Rio Grande Blue) is a group of several closely related varieties of flint corn grown in Mexico, the Southwestern United States, and the Southeastern United States. It is one of the main types of corn used for the traditional Southern and Central Mexican food known as tlacoyo.

It was originally developed by the Hopi, the Pueblo Indians of the Rio Grande in Arizona, and several Southeastern tribes, including the Cherokee. It remains an essential part of Hopi dishes like piki bread. Blue corn meal is a corn meal that is ground from whole blue corn and has a sweet flavor. It is also a staple of New Mexican cuisine used commonly to make tortillas.

Nixtamalization (/ˌnɪʃtəməlɪˈzeɪʃən, ˌnɪks-/ nish-tə-mə-lih-ZAY-shən) is a process for the preparation of maize (corn), 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. The term can also refer to the removal via an alkali process of the pericarp from other grains such as sorghum.

Nixtamalized corn has several benefits over unprocessed grain: It is more easily ground, its nutritional value is increased, flavor and aroma are improved, and mycotoxins are reduced by up to 97–100% (for aflatoxins).