People thought we were crazy because they thought that tortillas were just for Latino people,” says Sergio DeLeon when we asked him why he decided to start making Serigo’s Tortillas.
Well, that crazy gamble has really paid off for Sergio DeLeon, who opened his tortilla factory 11 years ago in Spokane, Washington. Now, Sergio’s tortillas can’t stay on the shelves. “The thing with our tortillas is it’s actually fresh. We make them here locally and our tortillas are not old. They have never been refrigerated before as our competitors do,” said DeLeon.
DeLeon’s massive tortilla maker inside his Spokane Valley store churns out 800 dozen tortillas an hour. That’s 9600 times 8 hours a day. That’s more than 76,000 tortillas a day that is handpicked and packed and hand weighed.
“After we put them in the machine, it’s actually feeding itself and then it cooks and after it cooks we let them cool down a little bit, just so we can package them. A lot of people, they actually just want them hot,” says DeLeon.
How Do They Make Serigo’s Tortillas?
DeLeon says the recipe is pretty simple: masa, water, and Shepherd’s Grain wheat. “We have actually been using it for close to 11 years on our tortillas. It’s all here local wheat from our community, from our farmers. The thing about this wheat is that we actually, each bag, it’s actually tagged with a code and it actually can tell you which farm this wheat came from,” says DeLeon.
For DeLeon, the future of his tortillas is limitless. He hopes to have them in stores across the country.
“I want to thank my customers that use our product. A lot of the local restaurants, Wild Sage, Davenport Grand and Milford’s. I mean, there’s a lot of good restaurants here in our community that use our product. Sometimes we learn by mistake, but it’s a process, you know? And we’re still learning,” said DeLeon.
A process that’s made a lot of tortilla lovers happy.
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