“We want the local community to buy and like these,” Karen says, pointing to the irregular edges on her tortillas - a sign that they’re handmade rather than machine-made.

Realizing that her demographic is both the tony spa-set of the nearby Sonoma Mission Inn as well as the heavily Latino working-class population, she aims to entice both. Fanatics can buy fresh masa for torillas for $1.25 or prepared tortillas for $3.50 a dozen. Crispy, dense and intensely flavored, they’re the real deal. Throughout the day, Karen and her staff use a wooden press to flatten the masa (or dough) and throw them on the grill at El Molino. Most say they use Maseca for their tortillas. Waikiki said only a few tortillerias in California still stone grind their corn, which, in local hunts for stone-ground corn tortillas proved true. But advocates of slower, more traditional culinary style bristle at its use - which is also predominant in the US. Maseca is a readily-available prepared commercial cornmeal flour that is ubiquitous throughout Latin America, and has simplified tortilla preparation. A longtime friend of Mexican cooking authority Diana Kennedy and Alice Waters, she’s concerned with what she sees happening to the native tortilla. But (grinding) is just the way it should be,” Karen said, hustling through her kitchen. People just stopped grinding corn and use instant ‘Maseca’ instead. Each morning, around 11am, staff feed soaked corn - grown by a single farmer in Nebraska - into the specially-made grinding machine for the day’s tortillas and tamales. One of the most passionate advocates for the iconic corn tortilla, used most frequently for tacos, taquitos, gorditas and of course, corn chips, is Karen Waikiki, The founder of Primavera Tamales and recently opened El Molino Central (11 Central Ave, Boyes Hot Springs) is renowned for revitalizing traditional methods of stone-grinding corn into masa, an art all but lost in Mexico. It’s sort of like eating a stale baguette - it’s still a baguette, but the magic is gone. But even the best ingredients can’t mask the fact that excellent tortillas are made fresh each day, rather than sitting for days (or weeks) in a refrigerator. Flour tortillas usually have five: Flour, baking powder, water, salt and lard. Corn tortillas, the most authentic of Latin American tortillas, should contain exactly three ingredients: Corn, lime (calcium hydroxide) and water. A culinary staple and nutritional cornerstone, they’re essential to the Latin American food lexicon, but sometimes overcomplicated. Sadly, most of the tortillas we consume are about as fresh and wholesome as gooey white bread - meaning not exactly the stuff that Mexican grandmothers were grinding by hand each day and serving fresh each meal. It’s hard to appreciate a great tortilla until you actually eat one.

Fresh tortillas