Marco Martinez is in the chips. Literally.
Martinez, 39, owner of Las Delicias, is the guy who came up with the restaurant’s famous tortilla chips, which are now in 60 Mid-South locations.
Las Delicias recently expanded its chips-and-dips footprint at Cordelia’s Market. Beginning this week, they will be cooking in the store’s kitchen and adding items to its grab-and-go cooler.
Las Delicias chips are already in 17 Kroger stores in the Memphis area and three in Mississippi. In 2013, a local Kroger store manager approached Martinez at the Memphis Farmers Market, he says. The manager said, “Hey, you think you have enough to sell to Kroger?” The chips at that first Kroger “did great.”
Martinez was a prep cook at Las Delicias before he came up with the chips in 2009. “We used to buy tortillas from a local place that made tortillas for us. We’d go pick them up hot and ready for us to use at the restaurant. Then one day the guy decided he didn’t want to make the particular size we needed anymore.”
That was 30 minutes before the restaurant opened, so Martinez’s dad had to buy tortillas at the grocery store. Then he said, “You know what? We’re going to make our own tortillas.” Martinez says, “He bought a little machine and we started making our own tortillas.”
They hired a customer who knew how to run a tortilla machine. His dad guaranteed the woman 40 hours’ work, but, Martinez, who learned how to use the machine, says, “She’d sit there for seven hours because we were done in an hour.”
So, they began selling hot tortillas to different restaurants. “I would take back whatever they didn’t sell and give it to the landlord for their horses to eat. We had so much, we were just throwing it away.”
Then Martinez thought, “You know what? I’m going to start cutting them up, frying them, and see how these chips compare to other tortilla chips.
“We started with a small batch and [kept] burning them. We kept on and on until we got them right and started making a few bags here and there. I started taking them to a place where I delivered tortillas.”
They were a hit. “I started having so many customers and so many orders, we had to run the machine all day long.”
Martinez’s focus is now the chips and dips. “Guacamole and pico de gallo dips. We started with those right around the time I started with the chips. I was like, ‘I need something to sell with the chips at the farmers market.’”
Moisture is the main difference between their tortilla chips and other corn chips. “Tortilla chips have a lot of humidity. When you are making the tortillas, you put in a certain amount of water. One part water, one part masa or flour. Other chips taste different from ours. They make them very dry. My tortillas take four minutes to fry. The other ones take 20 to 30 seconds.”
That changes the taste, he says. “When you put the chips in the frying pan, it kind of makes them blister. When they do that, they look very thick.”
As a result, Las Delicias tortilla chips “kind of melt in your mouth like a corn-flake. Another difference is you can actually see the salt grains on our chips as opposed to the competition. We just sprinkle a little salt on top of them.”
The only salt on Las Delicias chips is “whatever sticks to them after they’ve been fried and dried. We try to get as much of our oil off them.”
Other chip makers sometimes “use super finely powdered salt. And they spray it along with oil so it sticks with the chips. So, they are a lot saltier than ours.”
Las Delicias no longer makes hot tortillas for other restaurants. Martinez needed the machines to make the chips. “We sell between 10,000 and 13,000 bags in a month.”
Las Delicias is at 4002 Park Avenue and at 5689 Quince Road. Cordelia’s Market is at 737 Harbor Bend Road in Harbor Town.
Elena Elisseeva | Dreamstime.com