This local company has what it takes to make the best burrito
CANTON -- Harbar LLC tortillas, available in stores under the name Maria & Ricardo's Tortilla Factory -- and as the shell of choice at Anna's Taqueria, Boloco, and many other local places that wish to remain anonymous (and pretend that the tortillas are their own) -- are among the freshest tasting and most elastic wraps on the market. Without these super pliable shells, the ever present stuffed burrito, loaded with meat, beans, rice, cheese, sour cream, guacamole, pico de gallo, and anything else even vaguely Tex-Mex, would be impossible. The success of burritos depends on the wrap's ability to hold the ingredients together without tearing or unraveling after it has been folded, covered in foil, and slid into a paper bag for your ride home. If the burrito crumbles as you're eating it, if it requires a fork or fingers to finish the job, it becomes an amazing mess and a fast food failure.
That's one of the reasons that the demand on Harbar's 60 employees for 250 kinds of tortillas is so high.
The company was started 20 years ago by Mexican-born Heidi Maria Hartung, who had a single machine in Jamaica Plain to produce corn tortillas. She sold under the name Maria & Ricardo's (her cousin Ricardo Barreta helped launch the business). In her native country, tortillas are a mainstay of the cuisine, served at least once a day. Hartung's were some of the first homemade tortillas available in this area.
Maria & Ricardo's grew quickly, expanded to include flour tortillas, and in 2000 took over a bigger space in a former bowling alley in Quincy. There, Hartung changed the company name to Harbar (for Hartung and Barreta). In 2002 Harbar moved to a 40,000 - square - foot building in an industrial park in Canton. The following year, Ezequiel Montemayor, a career tortilla man from Monterrey, Mexico, became CEO of the company.
Harbar bakery smells like roasted corn and looks and sounds like printing presses. Five days a week the tortilla machines run 24 hours a day. The flour is dumped into a pair of giant stainless steel silos. From the silos it slides right into the mixer, where it's combined with water, oil, salt, baking powder, and whatever flavoring is going into that batch. The mixed dough is piled into the chunker, cut into 15-pound slabs, then fed into a divider that chops the hunks of dough into baseball-size rounds. These balls are proofed on a conveyor belt for about 10 minutes, then pressed flat into the proper diameter and rolled through the oven, from which they emerge 35 second s later with craters and bubbles and little spots of brown. Plucked from the belt, and still hot from the oven, the tortillas are delicious and look and feel surprisingly homemade.
Everything in the factory is kosher and vegan and a few lines are certified organic. Tortillas come in 6-, 8-, 10-, 12-, and 14-inch rounds. The most popular are machine-pressed white flour tortillas; Harbar also makes corn, whole wheat, cilantro-lime, chipotle, low-carb, rustic home-style, and many others. Employees, most of whom are Latin American, prefer corn tortillas. Most take home piles of free tortillas, which are offered to employees once a week. The Maria & Ricardo's label will soon become 100 percent organic and be sold at supermarkets all over the East Coast.
Upstairs from the bakery, Harbar's offices are clean and dimly lit with lots of leather furniture. From a row of windows, you can look down into the bakery below. Montemayor, 59, with slicked-back hair and a suit, has old-fashioned manners; he studied food science and marketing at Cornell. ``People like tortillas," he says in a fading accent. ``They are very versatile. Really, you can put any food inside -- Mexican, Indian, and French -- whatever you like. They keep in the refrigerator for a very long time in good condition. They are now more popular than all other ethnic breads, pita bread, bagels, and English muffins included."
Downstairs, the conveyor belt runs right from the ovens into a cooling room about the size of a squash court, where the cooked tortillas ride through a five-minute maze of elevated tracks to cool down. As soon as the tortillas reach room temperature, workers in hairnets and white lab coats inspect, stack, count, and bag them. Rejects are tossed into bags and sent to feed local farm animals; the rest are passed through a metal detector and packed in boxes to be shipped out as soon as possible.
Unlike more familiar shelf-stable and preservative-laden tortillas, these have to be refrigerated. Montemayor says that he has come to recognize an ``unpleasant chemical flavor at the back of the tongue" when eating the type of tortillas that sit on shelves for months without drying out or growing mold. Harbar makes one line of shelf-stable tortillas, but they have what Montemayor calls ``undetectable preservatives" and only last for three weeks.
The CEO says that the company is always developing new recipes. Clients come with an idea and the bakers try to execute it. A couple of years ago, Ben and Jerry's was thinking about doing ice cream sandwich wraps and commissioned Harbar to make chocolate and cinnamon tortillas. ``It didn't exactly work out," says Montemayor. ``Not every idea goes into production, but I am always amazed at the creativity of American cooks."
Harbar tortillas are sold under private labels in many markets. Maria and Ricardo's brand are available at Harvest Co-op Markets and Whole Foods Markets (10 wheat or corn torti llas cost about $2.50).
NOTE: This is the first in a monthly column in which we explore what happens behind the scenes in all kinds of food and beverage businesses, restaurants, and markets.
