The century-old tortilla press works great for masa and, as the internet has proven, so much more.

Few kitchen tools have names that are literally prescriptive. A knife, for instance, does not describe its purpose. A blender, a juicer, and a food processor come closer, but these names describe functions and are open to an infinite range of inputs. The tortilla press, also called a tortilladora or prensa, on the other hand, is named precisely for the single task it was created to perform: pressing balls of dough into tortillas. This is why I was surprised when my Instagram Reels and TikTok For You Page feeds suddenly began to teem with brilliant, unconventional applications of the over-a-century-old Mexican appliance. Restaurant chefs and home cooks alike are using it to press chicken for cutlets, beef for carpaccio, seafood for ceviches, and more. It is a testament to ingenuity that the most humble devices can be reimagined to do far more than their inventors ever intended. How did we get here?

“I mean, look, the first tortilla presses were hands,” says Los Angeles Times columnist Gustavo Arellano, who has literally written books about tacos. Arellano views the tortilla press as a tool of industrialization, like the steam engine or the power loom, but for masa. It’s a technology that he ballparks at over a century old, dating back to records of the first Mexican restaurants. “You didn’t need a tool to expedite what you wanted to do when it was just making lunch, breakfast, and dinner for the family. Tortillas had always been handmade, with the pin roller or a bottle or your palms. The presses really took off at restaurants, where you need to produce uniformity in terms of shape and thickness at volume.”

Tortilla machines date back to the beginning of the 20th century and would become increasingly automated over subsequent decades, but for today’s purposes, we’re discussing the hand press: two heavy, flat-bottom round or square plates, most often made of wood or metal, attached by a hinge, with a handle that can be pressed down to apply pressure from the top plate to the bottom, flattening whatever has been placed in between. “It’s the perfect device to smush things,” Arellano says.

“I was immediately drawn to it for its utility, its sturdiness, and even its aesthetic,” Jorge Gaviria says of the popular high-end tortilla press sold by Masienda, the company he founded. Masienda began by selling masa harina made from single-origin heirloom corn wholesale to restaurants in the United States and Mexico, then expanded to selling tortilladoras. Its product was recently rated as one of the best on the market by Serious Eats. There are many styles, shapes, and sizes of tortilla presses that tend to vary from region to region in Mexico. Most of the presses you’ve likely seen are small, round, and made of cast iron or aluminum. Masienda’s model is a heavy 8-inch-wide square rolled-steel press that Gaviria first found in Oaxaca in the Mercado de Abastos in 2014, where he noticed that the square press shape was prevalent.

Masienda now sells thousands of tortilladoras a year, but Gaviria tells me the first client he ever supplied them for, the one who inspired his journey to become a tortilla press purveyor, was Enrique Olvera, the chef and owner of a restaurant group that includes Pujol in Mexico City and Cosme in New York—two of the top fine-dining restaurants serving any genre of cuisine on Earth, but also trailblazing Mexican restaurants. Gaviria recalls that Olvera saw Masienda’s square press and immediately understood the impact it would have on the cooks in the kitchen at Cosme, which produces more than a thousand tortillas a day from 35 kilos of masa nixtamalized and milled in-house. That’s a rate of roughly 200 freshly pressed and comal-cooked tortillas per hour through Cosme’s five hours of jam-packed dinner service, all handled by a single cook.

I spoke to Cosme’s chef de cuisine, Gustavo Garnica, who has been at the restaurant for over a decade, about the role the tortilla press plays in its daily operation. “Right after the molino, it’s the most important tool in our kitchen. You can’t walk to Best Buy or Bed Bath & Beyond to replace one in New York, you know?” Garnica says the size of the Masienda press is necessary because of its efficacy and the optionality its size offers. “It distributes the weight a little better than the round ones, there’s room to make our tlayudas, and we can press two tortillas at a time,” he tells me.

Over ten years, the Cosme kitchen has been reluctant to change tortilladoras, but it has happened two or three times. “We maintain our equipment as best we can, but occasionally with wear and tear we’ll have to replace one, because it can break down to a point where one press isn’t enough. That doubles your workload, which slows you down and wears you out over one service,” Garnica tells me. “But the tortilla ladies, they know what they like, what works for them, and it’s hard for them if I suddenly show up with a new one. I have a lady who has been making tortillas for us for six or seven years. She loves her press and won’t use a new one. She told me, ‘When I leave, I’m taking this with me.’”

Cosme’s kitchen doesn’t limit the press’s usage to tortillas. It’s enlisted to smash—well, smush—plantains for tostones, along with a few other flattened vegetable dishes. Similar innovations are evangelized by the food content creator Jesse Jenkins, who grew up in Southern California before moving to London, where he combined his love of cooking and photography to create a social media presence with nearly a million followers between Instagram and TikTok. Inspiration struck when the LA kid, who was raised on Mexican food and has always had a tortilladora in his kitchen, was developing a recipe for tuna carpaccio.

“With certain tuna dishes, you have to slowly pound it out to maintain thickness and shape, and it’s a pain in the ass. I just looked over at my tortilla press one day and thought, ‘Why wouldn’t I just use this?’” Jenkins says. “It exerts an incredible amount of pressure, like a car jack. You just layer the fish, or whatever it is, between two sheets of plastic, and the press does the work for you. It’s super fun, and anyone can do it.” Jenkins has turned his experiments with the press into a series that has been liked, shared, and commented on by tens of thousands of followers across platforms, some of whom are chefs who have told him they’ve incorporated the press into prep in their non-Mexican restaurants for applications like flattening scallops for crudo or lamb ribs for fried cutlets.

While Jenkins is widely credited on social media as the first to reimagine the tortilla press online, he is quick to acknowledge that at some point, elsewhere, offline, it was probably employed by some ingenious cook in a similar manner. “I didn’t invent anything, but I put it on the internet first,” Jenkins says, as content creators and chefs around the world will continue to experiment with their humble tortilladoras to see what other magic can be coaxed from them.

An example of the pre-viral utilization of nontraditional tortilla press jobs is presented by Luis Eduardo Swain, the owner of Que Pique Goods, a new Bay Area condiment company inspired by chile vinegars in Central America and the Caribbean. To get the word out about Que Pique, Swain makes food videos, filmed in his backyard for Instagram. He prepares seafood dishes, tostadas, choripan sandwiches, and other dishes that pair well with his proprietary chile vinegar sauce, often utilizing a tortilla press in the newly popular fashion. But one of his most interesting videos comes courtesy of a recipe he learned from his mother years ago: tostones.

 

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In a recent video, Swain uses a tortilla press to flatten his plantain chunk after its first fry, then he plunges it back into the oil for more crisping. It’s a technique borrowed from his mother, who began using a tortilla press for tostones several years ago despite their lack of presence in Nicaragua. “She says in Nicaragua we use our hands for tortillas because they’re thicker, and for tostones they’ll use the bottom of a bottle of soda or beer or something,” Swain says. “My mom thinks [the tortilla press] came into our house about five years ago. She’s never seen one in Nicaragua.” So in this instance, the Mexican tool has made its way into a Central American kitchen in California as a kind of handshake across cultures, a latent recognition that there are few better tools for the act of smushing foodstuffs than the tortilladora.

This isn’t to say that the tortilla press is up to every flattening prep job in a kitchen. Jenkins has had his share of misadventures in pursuit of the next viral video. “There was a bunch of stuff that didn’t work. The most hilarious was [when] I thought I could make a smashed cucumber salad with a press,” says Jenkins. “It’s so much pressure, it just completely exploded everywhere. So that didn’t work, or I just haven’t figured it out. Maybe someone else will get it right.” With the innovations we’ve seen in just the past few months, you’d be foolish to place a ceiling on what might be smushed next.

Lead photo courtesy or Masienda