I found cal!

*Does a happy dance*

Cal, also known as lime. (not the citrus, lime the mineral. As in limestone.)

Why am I happy-dancing about having found some lime? Do you remember my rant/rave/long winded speech about nixtamalization? I touched on the subject at the bottom of that post.

If you would like to know even more about nixtamalization, and making the nutrients in corn more bioavailable, The Nourishing Gourmet has a lovely in depth post on it, here.

Now, I was searching out cal, lime or pickling lime, because my traditional stuffing for thanksgiving calls for cornbread. I've come a long way, from jiffy in a box (of course that has geletin anyways, so thats been out for a long time) to geletin free boxed, to homemade throughout this year, to an attempt at homemade, limed cornbread.

I promise, I'll tell you all about my experiment as it unfolds. I'm definitely experimenting here, because I think the best way to have done this would have been to soak the corn in lime, and then dry it and then grind it. Alas, the masa harina (limed cornmeal/flour) was noway nohow suitable in terms of size of the grains. Cornmeal was what we desired. Nixtamalization traditionally used lime as well as several other alkaline substances. So my thought is thus: Soak the cornmeal in just enough limewater to soak it. Then mix in buttermilk the next day, and other ingrediants to make cornbread, right before I bake it. I'm hoping it works... I did buy enough cornmeal for two cornbreads, but it also involves fat, and buttermilk and other expensive ingrediants and I always hate to waste food.

I'll report back.

And if you would like to purchase your own cal or lime locally to you? Turn no further than your local mexican or other south american grocery store. In with the other spices, you will likely find Cal, or lime. (or maybe pickling lime). I'm sure it can also be had online, but it is so important to support your local economy, as much as possible. Plus, it was very interesting, my first foray into what has always been in my life, but sort of a scary unknown. Was it like china town with unknown smelly things like seahorses for sale? who knew what lay inside the mexican grocery store. Turns out, its amazingly normal, just lots of cool stuff (lots of dried chilis, and other fun unusual produce, your average amount of processed foods, and more tortillas and hot sauce and salsa than average.)