Buying Mexican Ingredients in Melbourne: The City That Actually Nixtamalises

Fresh nixtamalised masa is the hardest thing to get in Australia. It is a wet, living product with a short life, it cannot be imported, and making it commercially means buying maize, cooking it in lime water, resting it and milling it before dawn. Melbourne is the Australian city where that actually happens at commercial scale, and that single fact makes a Melbourne shopping run different from a Perth or a Hobart one. The rest of this guide assumes you want to take advantage of it. Current businesses are listed in our Melbourne store directory.

Fresh masa, frozen masa, masa harina

These are three different products and confusing them is the most common Melbourne mistake.

• Fresh masa is dough, sold wet, usually by the kilo, and it is best the day it is made. It will keep a couple of days refrigerated and it freezes reasonably well if you wrap it tightly in portions. Fresh masa is the reason a tortilla tastes of maize rather than of nothing.
• Frozen tortillas made from nixtamal are the next best thing and are far easier to buy, since they travel and keep. Reheat them on a dry hot pan, not in a microwave, and stack them under a cloth as they come off.
• Masa harina is nixtamalised maize that has been dried and milled to a flour. It is shelf-stable, it is the only form most of Australia can get, and it is not the same thing as polenta, cornflour or plain maize meal. If the packet does not say nixtamalised, or list lime or calcium hydroxide in the process, it is not masa harina.

If you are buying fresh masa, ask what it was milled for. Tortilla masa is milled finer than tamal masa, and using one for the other gives you either a gritty tortilla or a dense, heavy tamal.

The inner north and the delis

Melbourne's inner northern suburbs carry a dense concentration of Mediterranean, Iberian and Latin American food shops, which matters for Mexican cooking in a specific way: those shops carry the things adjacent to the Mexican list. Dried pulses in bulk, whole spices, smoked paprika, good lard and dripping, bay, cinnamon, oregano sold by weight rather than in a jar the size of a thimble, and cheeses in the crumbly and the melting families that stand in for Mexican styles. Pan-Latin grocers in the same belt cover the properly Mexican end: dried chillies, tinned chipotles, piloncillo, jamaica and tamarind.

The west and the north-west

Melbourne's western and north-western suburbs have deep Middle Eastern, African and South-East Asian grocery networks. For a Mexican cook the useful lines there are dried beans and chickpeas in large bags at working prices, fresh coriander sold by the bunch rather than by the sad refrigerated sleeve, limes by the kilo, chillies fresh and dried, and heavy flat steel pans. It is also the easiest part of the city in which to buy a whole goat or lamb shoulder cut the way you want it, which matters if you are cooking barbacoa or birria.

The markets

Melbourne's large public markets are the practical answer to two problems at once: produce that has not been chilled into blandness, and a butcher who will talk to you. Go early for produce and late for prices, and if you are cooking anything that wants a long braise, ask the butcher for the cuts by description rather than by Mexican name, since the Australian carcass breakdown uses different words.

A sensible Melbourne shopping order

• Once or twice a year: dried chillies in bulk, masa harina, piloncillo, tinned chipotles, jamaica, tamarind, dried oregano. All shelf-stable, all cheaper in quantity.
• Monthly: a run for frozen nixtamal tortillas, a good lard or dripping, cheese, and anything that lives in the freezer.
• The day you are cooking: fresh masa if you are lucky enough to be near it, produce, herbs, and meat.

What Melbourne still cannot give you

Being the best-supplied Mexican city in Australia is not the same as being well supplied. Fresh epazote and hoja santa are effectively absent, fresh Mexican chilli varieties such as jalapeno and serrano appear only sporadically and seasonally, and most Mexican fresh cheeses cannot be imported at all, so what you buy is an Australian-made approximation. Those are structural gaps caused by biosecurity and by the size of the market, not by any shop failing you, and our guides explain which is which.

Once the shopping is done, the recipes are where the masa earns its keep. If you want to taste what good nixtamal should be like before you cook with it, the Melbourne restaurant listings are worth a read first.