Do You Know The Masa Man?

When Miami chef Richard Ortega decided to create The Maiz Project, it wasn’t to follow some foodie fad or create a new niche of unexplored culinary ingenuity. It was a desire to restore a childhood memory using his favorite dish. Ask Ortega to share the ingredients needed to recreate this memory, and you’ll find its all the elements of his abuela’s cucina.

The first essential ingredient would be the terroir of his hometown, San Carlos, Venezuela, a pastoral region west of Caracas at the edge of the Los Llanos plains. It was small enough that he could drive from one end of town and straight out again in five minutes, passing the small farms dotting the landscape along the way.

Ortega calls his restaurant a “project” because, up to this point, that’s exactly what it’s been, an evolving progression that’s taken him from pop-up tents in parking lots to weekend markets and—presently—a stand in Miami’s Time Out Market, a journey made possible by the traditions passed on by his father’s mother. “She would take me each day to the market to get what was needed for the day’s meal. No matter what she was preparing, the one thing she always brought home was corn,” says Ortega. “Then she would cook for us arepas. It was our bread, what we eat every morning, for a midday snack, or again for dinner.”

Her arepas might be stuffed with chicken repurposed from the previous night’s dinner, a fried egg with butter, or a single slab of his favorite cheese, a salty llanero. What was constant was his abuela’s task of crafting the arepas, an infinite loop on repeat. It would start the day before, grinding maiz with a pilón—a wooden mortar and pestle—to expose the core of each kernel. From there it was boiling, steeping, and resting for a flour that would be ground, mixed, and seasoned just before cooking over the open flame of the parrilla.

He might still be there, if it hadn’t been for COVID. It was in early 2021, while cooking at La Natural, amid the confusion of those early days emerging from the pandemic, that Ortega says he reached a point of ennui. His passion for cooking—dreaming up one-off specials, the calamity of a busy dinner rush, the gratifying feeling of feeding someone—was waning.

Meanwhile, all around him, culinary ingenuity was afoot in Miami. His colleagues, a vast populace of jobless chefs, were in a similar state of despair. Propelled by the need to create, and the downtime to follow their passion, some were taking matters into their own hands. “I thought, ‘If I can do great things for all these restaurants, then why not do something for myself?’ What do I have to lose?” says Ortega.

Ortega debuted his arepas at J. Wakefield Brewing, a known hub for up-and-coming chefs eager to test the waters as would-be restaurateurs. Following in the footsteps of popular pop-ups before him, he assembled a makeshift kitchen on an overcast Sunday in the brewery parking lot.

The weather was a constant worry—would it be too hot, too wet? What was the best way to store and transport food without refrigeration? What equipment makes for an easy setup while delivering the perfect cook time? Could he find staff that could commit to an erratic schedule? How best to prep for fluctuating crowds? There was the good: he could deliver customers his handcrafted arepas with little investment, no overhead, and the freedom to pop-up wherever demand for The Maiz Project’s menu took him. The downside: it was quickly becoming a full-time job simply preparing for the unknown.

It didn’t take long for whispers of Ortega’s arepas to make their way to Smorgasburg Miami founder Gaston Becherano, who was on the hunt for local chefs that could provide the city’s new open-air market with Miami’s most inspiring fare. When it opened a few weeks later, in March 2022, Ortega found ease committing to the market’s Saturday-only schedule. Steady crowds and plenty of Wynwood foot traffic meant he was soon selling upwards of 300 arepas a day from a short and sweet menu of flame-cooked sandwiches.

As demand grew, so did the chef’s aspirations, and again the desire to bring his food to a larger audience. Yet another steppingstone presented itself in the form of a stall at Time Out Market, the South Beach food hall where a number of local chefs have gone to do the same. “It was an amazing experience at Smorgasburg, learning the ropes, growing the business,” says Ortega. “It opened a lot of doors and allowed me to grow into the Time Out space so that more people can understand what it is I’m doing with this project.”

For Ortega’s Maiz Project to fulfill its mission—to showcase a traditional cooking technique that shines a light on the forgotten culture of Venezuelan cooking—he first had to learn the art of nixtamalization, the process of turning maiz to masa.

At Time Out Market, it begins, of course, with the maiz. Ortega sources corn from small farms in Mexico because of the wide assortment available and consistently high quality of product, choosing single origin heirloom varieties, each with a name, a provenance, and story all their own. Blue, red, yellow—the type of corn is always changing—allowing the experience at the Maiz Project to do the same, no two batches of masa alike. Where some result in a soft, creamy dough in a matter of hours, says Ortega, others are harder to break down, yielding a rough and grainy texture.

After cooking and grinding, the resulting meal is mixed with water and salt. Then, like a baker leavening dough, it rests—anywhere from 12 to 48 hours. The time is dependent on many variables, from the starch content of the corn to the mercurial South Florida climate. It’s this process that allows the flavor of the corn to pronounce itself in sweet, sometimes umami-like notes, one Ortega believes best evokes Venezuela’s lost arepa culture, and the same he endeavors to recreate.

Like the arepas, the menu at Time Out Market is always evolving, ingredients taking cue from what’s available, in season, and local. But one thing that will never leave the menu is Ortega’s steak arepa. A best seller, it’s a simple homage to the chef’s hometown restaurant that served a dish of chimichurri steak, a celebratory meal his family would order for special occasions.

At Time Out, the chef prepares it with long, thick-cut ribbons of meat he layers along with a fragrant house-made chimichurri. It’s met with a fat slice of queso blanco, all of it stuffed into grill-marked arepas delivered hot from the flames that—like his abuela’s cucina—laces every bite with a hint of char and smoke. The meal may seem fleeting, a simple sandwich that can be devoured in just a few bites, but it becomes transportive once you know Ortega’s story.