Neighborhood gem: Family, Mexican roots power organic corn tortilla shop

Something more powerful than memory guided Claudia Monroy to open a Mexican tortilla shop. Before she and her husband debuted their Sierra Madre Tortilla Factory in Lake Worth Beach last year, she wished she could remember the days she spent at her grandfather’s own tortillería in Guerrero state, Mexico.

But how could she remember those days in their town of Arcelia? She was a baby in a bassinet, probably sleeping while her father cooked the corn and her mother ground the masa for the factory’s fresh tortillas.

What powered her tortilla shop dream was a kernel of an idea that came to her during the shutdown days of the Covid-19 pandemic. She wanted to find fresh, organic corn tortillas for her then 2-year-old son Riad, who is now 5. She wanted to sprinkle them with salt and roll them up for him at snack time the way her mom used to do for her.

“I spent so much time at home alone with our son that I started making ‘our’ food,” she says, referring to the Mexican-inspired food of her childhood. “But every time I’d go to the store and look for organic corn tortillas, I couldn’t find them.”

Monroy tried making them at home but something was off, she says.

“They didn’t feel right, like a good corn tortilla should taste,” she says. “So I went down the rabbit hole.”

Her curiosity took flight in countless Google searches, grew into a mission and found its force in borrowed memories and her family’s Mexican roots.

The result: a neighborhood tortillería and shop that’s visited by locals seeking authentic tortillas made with organic, stone-ground corn, discerning chefs and those who have heard about Claudia’s mom’s homemade tamales, salsas, guacamoles, flautas and masa-thickened Mexican hot chocolate (champurrado) and her father’s Saturday carne asada specials.

“It wasn’t the plan to sell prepared foods, but people were asking if we had other food items,” says Monroy, who opened the shop in November 2022.

What began as sporadic dishes prepared by her mother, Claudia Dominguez, created a demand for her scratch-made tamales, beans and rice, chilaquiles and whatever she whipped up on any given day.

The family collaboration extends beyond mother and daughter. Claudia Monroy’s husband, Mounir Monroy, goes to the shop each day at 3:30 a.m. to make the tortillas. By 7:30 a.m., he heads to his day job at an urgent-care company, where he is head of business development.

Claudia’s father Alfredo Morales, who taught her and her husband to use their commercial corn mill, stops by to help out when he’s needed. He has been a great resource. It was his father who owned the tortilla factory, Tortillería Lupita.

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Corn chronicles at Sierra Madre Tortilla Company

The tortillas are as much a labor of love as they are a work of science and ancient tradition.

The Monroys start with white, blue and yellow organic corn that’s grown on a small family farm in Illinois. They run the corn kernels through a complex nixtamalization process, boiling them in slaked lime water. They grind the treated corn in the corn mill they purchased in Mexico. Another machine forms the tortillas, which are cooled on a special conveyor belt.

With such machinery and the family’s help, they’ve mastered the system to the point that it runs smoothly. But while the tortilla-shop idea was still taking shape, and she was in research and testing mode, Monroy says her parents watched from a distance. She hadn’t asked for their help. She wasn’t sure where her inspiration would take her.

But after buying a small corn mill for home and attempting to prepare the fresh corn for tortillas, she hit a wall.

“You need to boil the corn at such high heat, and I was cooking it on a glass-top stove that doesn’t get that hot. It was my first attempt and I failed at it. The corn was so hard. I was upset that I didn’t know what I was doing wrong,” says Monroy, 30. “I eventually asked my parents for help.”

When she did, a new world opened up. Especially when she asked them to tell her all about the process at her grandfather Adalberto Morales’ tortillería in Arcelia.

Those details had not been part of their conversations while Monroy was growing up in Palm Beach County. Her parents, who emigrated from Mexico when she was 8 months old, raised her in Greenacres.

“I had this moment of realization. I was struggling to do this on my own, and my parents had all this knowledge,” she says.

Her mother recalled they’d use a sardine can to measure the corn at the tortilla factory in Mexico. Her father, who went to work at the tortilla factory when he was a teenager, cautioned her about the amount of hard, physical work that would be involved. Monroy says she found motivation in the challenge.

Her paternal grandmother Lucila has been one of her best mentors in the tortilla craft. On visits from her home in Mexico, her grandmother first educated Monroy on one of the most important elements in cooking the corn: the heat.

“She told me, ‘If you want to cook this corn, you have to do it outside and over fire.’ She taught me the proper way,” Monroy says.

A year later, she was hand-making tortillas for local friends and family.

“Then I put the tortillas on Facebook Marketplace, but I was terrified. I still felt like I was just slinging masa,” she says.

Even so, she trusted her instincts and discovered her tortilla-making endeavor was more than a pandemic gig. It was a calling, she says.

“I became passionate about it,” says Monroy, who looked to her grandfather Adalberto’s example for encouragement on days when she felt less confident. “My grandfather was an orphan but he became an entrepreneur. He became a photographer. That was his first business. His second business was the tortilla factory.”

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A charmed space

With its diversity of Latino communities, Lake Worth Beach seemed an ideal place to open Sierra Madre, says Monroy. She and her husband also wanted a space located close to major highways. A few months into their search, their real estate agent called to say she had found a promising space on North Dixie Highway.

The shop space seemed meant to be. It had housed pastry chef Jennifer Reed’s bakery, The Sugar Monkey. That’s where the Monroys ordered their wedding cake, a three-tiered beauty frosted in white and adorned with peonies.

In that space, the couple would prepare, make and package their tortillas, chips and other related products. They would also run a local distribution business to deliver Sierra Madre tortillas to local markets, restaurants and cafés.

It was there that they tapped into a vibrant local community.

“The community support has been so good. People will come in and say, ‘I tried your tamales because my neighbor told me about them.’ People started sharing our food with their neighbors,” says Claudia Monroy. “It’s a nice neighborhood where everyone talks to each other.”

And there are soul-warming moments when customers from her native Mexico wander in.

“They’ll say, ‘this takes me back’ or ‘this smells like a real tortilla shop,’” she says.

On those days, the pandemic-era rabbit holes, the corn-cooking trials and fails fade into the background. What is revealed is something greater. The journey she began as a way to find quality tortillas for her son brought her home to Mexico, to her family’s roots.

“It all came at a time when I was searching for something to do, without knowing exactly why,” she says. “Now I feel I was destined to do this.”

Sierra Madre Tortilla Factory

Located at 2402 N. Dixie Hwy, Lake Worth Beach, 561-306-9605, on Instagram @SierraMadre.co. Pre-orders accepted at CashDrop.com/SierraMadre.

Hours: Open Monday through Friday from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m., Saturday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Sunday from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m.

This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Best authentic Mexican tortillas near West Palm at Sierra Madre shop