The Carniceria for <i> Masa y Mas</i>

Masa is to people of Mexican heritage what potatoes are to the Irish or pasta is to Italians.

Masa is a dough used as a filler in tamales or for making tortillas. Its ingredients are simple: stone-ground corn, water and lime. One of the freshest sources of masa can be found at El Toro Carniceria (meat shop) in Santa Ana, where a small factory behind the deli counter pumps out masa daily.

Juan Carlos Bonilla, one of three brothers who has run the El Toro market for the past 15 years, takes pride in showing visitors how masa is made. (The Bonillas periodically give informal tours to neighborhood school groups.) Corn kernels, bought from a Midwest supplier and stored in a silo behind the market, are pumped into large square vats, where they go through several soaking and rinsing processes that serve to strip the husks from the kernels.

The kernels are then pulverized, mixed, mashed and cooked into a dough, which El Toro sells for about 50 cents a pound or in tortilla form, still warm from baking. (To guarantee freshness, the El Toro-brand tortillas are sold only at the market.) No preservatives, Carlos Bonilla notes proudly. The store’s masa- making process is repeated seven days a week, and it revs up on major holidays, when demand explodes: Christmas shoppers will line up around the block for their fresh masa.

Situated in the heart of Santa Ana’s barrio, the El Toro is as much a social gathering place as it is a market. In the deli section, where salespeople fill to-go containers from large trays full of such things as salsa smothered in a bed of cilantro and cooked cactus, customers mill about gossiping or reading one of a half-dozen different Spanish-language newspapers.

On this particular Saturday, the store is so busy that El Toro employees have to direct traffic in the crowded parking lot. Entire families crowd the vegetable section, debating whether to buy the California, guajillo or nuevo Mexico chile-- different varieties fill an entire counter.

As rows of animal-shaped pinatas peer from the ceiling, a clerk unfolds lengths of banana leaves as big as beach mats. A display case the size of an industrial-strength refrigerator has been almost emptied of its Mexican-style cookies and bread . A huge tray sits nearby waiting to be loaded.

In the meat counter, beef feet, beef brains and beef liver are piled high. A pig’s head keeps watch over pork rinds, and whole purple octopuses are rolled up like giant fists the size of honeydew melons.

You’d have to travel far to find this much variety in Mexican and Central American food. But then, some people consider El Toro the Latino gastronomic center of the Southland, if you believe Carlos Bonilla. He jokes that people in Mexico City have been known to query their friends whether they stopped in at El Toro when visiting the area. And here’s what he says they say: “If you haven’t been to El Toro, then you haven’t been to Santa Ana.”

* EL TORO CARNICERIA

* 1340 W. 1st St., Santa Ana

* (714) 836-1393.

* Open daily, from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m.