Blue corn

Blue corn (also known as Hopi maize) is a variety of flint maize grown in Mexico and the Southwestern United States, particularly in the states of Arizona and New Mexico. It is one of the main types of corn used for the traditional Southern and Central Mexican food known as tlacoyo.

It was originally developed by the Hopi, and remains an essential part of Hopi dishes like piki bread. Blue corn meal is a corn meal that is ground from whole blue corn and has a sweet flavor. It is also a staple of New Mexican cuisine.

In addition to its sharply different color, blue corn has several nutritional advantages over standard yellow or white corn varieties. It contains 20 percent more protein and has a lower glycemic index than white corn. When used to make tortillas, blue corn produces a sweeter, nuttier taste than yellow or white corn, and is a more complete protein source. A certain technique is used to grind the blue maize to make it release niacin.

Varieties

Different varieties of blue corn range in color from powdery gray to nearly black. There are three varieties of the blue corn: "standard" blue (sakwaqa'ö), hard blue (huruskwapu), and gray-blue (maasiqa'ö). Because of its hard kernels, huruskwapu is most resistant to storage pests and traditionally was the preferred variety for storing. When the grinding was all done by hand, women preferred using maasiqa'ö because it is soft and easier to grind but the color was not as vibrant as that of the sakwaqa'ö or huruskwapu.

Blue Corn

Blue Corn (c. 1920 – May 3, 1999), also known as Crucita Calabaza, was a Native American potter from San Ildefonso Pueblo, New Mexico, in the United States. She became famous for reviving San Ildefonso polychrome wares and had a very long and productive career.

Early life

Her grandmother first introduced her to pottery making at the age of three. Maria Martinez’s sister gave her the name “Blue Corn” during the naming ceremony, which is the Native American tradition of naming a child.

Blue Corn attended school at the pueblo in her early years. She then went to Santa Fe Indian School, which was 24 miles (39 km) from home. While attending school in Santa Fe, her mother and father died, and she was sent to live with relatives in southern California. Here she worked as a maid for a short time in Beverly Hills.

At the age of 20, she married Santiago “Sandy” Calabaza, a silversmith from Santo Domingo Pueblo. Together they settled at San Ildefonso, where she bore and raised 10 children. During World War II, Blue Corn worked as a housecleaner in Los Alamos for the physicist, J. Robert Oppenheimer.

Blue

Blue is the colour between violet and green on the optical spectrum of visible light. Human eyes perceive blue when observing light with a wavelength between 450 and 495 nanometres. Blues with a higher frequency and thus a shorter wavelength gradually look more violet, while those with a lower frequency and a longer wavelength gradually appear more green. Pure blue, in the middle, has a wavelength of 470 nanometres. In painting and traditional colour theory, blue is one of the three primary colours of pigments, along with red and yellow, which can be mixed to form a wide gamut of colours. Red and blue mixed together form violet, blue and yellow together form green. Blue is also a primary colour in the RGB colour model, used to create all the colours on the screen of a television or computer monitor.

The modern English word blue comes from Middle English bleu or blewe, from the Old French bleu, a word of Germanic origin, related to the Old High German word blao. The clear sky and the deep sea appear blue because of an optical effect known as Rayleigh scattering. When sunlight passes through the atmosphere, the blue wavelengths are scattered more widely by the oxygen and nitrogen molecules, and more blue comes to our eyes. Rayleigh scattering also explains blue eyes; there is no blue pigment in blue eyes. Distant objects appear more blue because of another optical effect called atmospheric perspective.

Maize

Maize (/ˈmeɪz/ MAYZ; Zea mays subsp. mays, from Spanish: maíz after Taíno mahiz), commonly known as corn, is a large grain plant domesticated by indigenous peoples in Mexico in prehistoric times about 10,000 years ago. The six major types of corn are dent corn, flint corn, pod corn, popcorn, flour corn, and sweet corn.

The leafy stalk of the plant produces separate pollen and ovuliferous inflorescences or ears, which are fruits, yielding kernels (often erroneously called seeds). Maize kernels are often used in cooking as a starch.

History

Most historians believe maize was domesticated in the Tehuacan Valley of Mexico. The Olmec and Mayans cultivated it in numerous varieties throughout Mesoamerica, cooked, ground or processed through nixtamalization. Beginning about 2500 BC, the crop spread through much of the Americas. The region developed a trade network based on surplus and varieties of maize crops. After European contact with the Americas in the late 15th and early 16th centuries, explorers and traders carried maize back to Europe and introduced it to other countries. Maize spread to the rest of the world because of its ability to grow in diverse climates. Sugar-rich varieties called sweet corn are usually grown for human consumption as kernels, while field corn varieties are used for animal feed, various corn-based human food uses (including grinding into cornmeal or masa, pressing into corn oil, and fermentation and distillation into alcoholic beverages like bourbon whiskey), and as chemical feedstocks.