MOUNT VERNON — The latest piece of equipment at the Bread Lab, a heavenly smelling corner of the Washington State University campus here, is a tortilla press, a gift from Chipotle Mexican Grill.
The lab is working on a project for the restaurant chain, which says it wants to improve the quality of mass-market food. The goal: create a tortilla that is as soft, pliant and tasty as something an abuelita may make in her kitchen but one that can be produced on a vast scale. Each day, Chipotle uses more than 800,000 tortillas for its burritos and tacos, and by the time it reconfigures its manufacturing facilities and distribution processes to produce the new tortilla, it will probably need more than a million.
The company is getting closer to figuring it out. The ingredients in the tortillas now? Flour, water, whole-wheat flour, canola oil, salt, baking soda, wheat bran, fumaric acid, calcium propionate, sorbic acid and sodium metabisulfite.
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