Talk about starting a business from scratch! That is almost exactly what Puebloan Lynnea Ruybal did. She went all ‘old school’ and word of mouth, and straight into a real time boutique business selling—of all things—tortillas!
The San Luis Valley native’s side hustle—her main job is health care—is Lynnea’s Tortillas. And she does it all—are you sitting down—on the honor system. Customers navigate to her front door, put their money in her cash drop and walk away with their tortillas or her homemade biscochitos, a buttery cookie with an easily recognizable taste of anise.
Her business plan, if it can be called one, was born from love, grief and a generation’s old family recipe. That’s it. Oh! There’s also a ton of sweat equity. You see, Ruybal is not only the brains but 90 percent of the brawn in the making of Lynnea’s Tortillas.
Her journey began with a simple question, one that many people struggle with after the death of a loved one. How to keep a memory alive? In this case, the loved one was her mother, Katherine, who died suddenly last fall.
“When I started,” Ruybal shared, “it was just to keep my mind busy through the grief.” But a single thought kept wafting through her mind. Of all things, it was tortillas. Yes. Tortillas, but a lot more.
Ruybal remembered the family kitchen and, as a child, watching her grandmother or mother preparing family meals. The routine, precise and instinctual.
It was a bit more than muscle memory, she recalled, in taking the masa or dough, shaping it into rows of donut-sized lumps, patting each to ensure uniformity before carefully shaping them into full circles under the weight a well-used bolillo, a wooden rolling pin. The final touch, carefully laying each one on a seasoned comal or griddle until the masa could be called a tortilla.
The result then, as it is today in her own kitchen, a perfect or, in this case, a perfectly imperfect tortilla. “My tortillas look very traditional,” Ruybal says. “Not store bought.” Hers, she said, “have darker spots, look almost burnt…that, to me, is perfect.” Excellent bordering upon supreme, one might say.
While Ruybal’s tortilla operation may seem tranquil, what goes on behind the scenes is anything but tranquil, mostly because her healthcare job takes precedence. But when it’s time to make the tortillas, it’s all business.
“It’s very labor intensive,” she says. The ‘prep’ work takes place one day after work, tortilla production on another. And the work is all done by hand; no machinery, but plenty of love.
While the work can be arduous, it also carries with it the nostalgia of another time. “I always watched them making tortillas,” Ruybal said. As a young girl, she took notice of every little thing from her spot under the kitchen table where her reward was often a warm, buttered tortilla. It’s a treat she still sometimes gifts herself today.
Ruybal is in charge of mixing the ingredients, kneading the masa and rolling each individual tortilla. Her husband and their two sons are there to lend a hand with the bagging of the final product. Each bag holds a baker’s dozen. When all the work is complete, she says she will have made “fifty to sixty dozen.” Some will be sold at the door, with the rest sold at a local farmers market.
As a healthcare professional, Ruybal says she’s done her homework. Preparation is done within all the guidelines and code of county health.
Ruybal’s not, at least so far, plotted out a long-term plan for her tortillas or biscochitos. For now, her tortillas will remain either sold from the cheerfully toned, but mostly blue box outside her front door or at the farmers market where she has also found a following. A food truck may one day be in the offing. But not anytime soon.
Ruybal’s connection to tradition, most especially to the maternal generations who still inspire, she said, are loving but also complicated. That second part, mostly with her mother.
“We bumped heads,” Ruybal said. “But only because she loved me.” The relationship was the product of two “strong personalities.” When her mother passed last September, two rivers whose sometimes churning currents could roil the waters, had melded. “We were in a good place.”
For more information on Lynnea’s Tortillas, she said, you can find her on Facebook.
