ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (KRQE) – Breakfast is the most important meal of the day. In New Mexico a must-have breakfast staple is tortillas. “My parents came up with the recipe based on another tortilla that they had,” said Shannon Rainosek, CEO of Frontier Restaurant. “Here at Frontier we make 11,000 tortillas a day and our sister store Golden Pride makes another 11,000 a day.”
So what goes into making a Frontier tortilla? After a blend of ingredients, the dough goes through quite the procedure. “Years ago we tried having someone make them commercially, and it wasn’t the same,” said Shannon Rainosek. “They had the same recipe and everything but just the mass production in a huge bakery, they just did not taste the same.”
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After the dough is made, it gets placed into another machine that makes them into little balls. Afterward, the dough balls get placed on a tray and taken to the oven and conveyor belt. “We’ve proofed the dough in the back and then we bring it over here [oven]. He puts it into the machine and we get this nice fluffy tortilla that goes through the machine. Then it [tortillas] comes out here to the conveyor and it’s cooled down on these racks.
Once the tortillas are cooled, they are packaged and ready to eat.
Another beloved thing ordered at Frontier is their freshly squeezed orange juice. First, they sort through the oranges to make sure there are not any spoiled ones. Then they put them in the machine’s carousel. “Basically it’s an automatic system to squeeze the oranges but like all mechanical items, they do have little misfires and so it does require a little bit of watching,” said Larry Rainosek, owner of Frontier Restaurant.
Larry Rainosek said he got his first orange juice machine in California, but high demand required a bigger one, the latest one coming from Spain.
