Homemade Tortillas

It has been a minute since the last time I posted, however two new recipes have been photographed and are in the works, so more deliciousness to come. This one doesn't have a guestmouth, but it does feature cute old people; making it the first installment in my two part series on cute old people and flat breads.

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Wheat tortillas are simple, require no special or hard-to-find ingredients, and are cheap as hell even if you use really high quality flour. I used chemical treated crap, but the tortillas still came out decently tasty.

So the recipe is highly scalable but the ratio is about:

1 cup of flour to

2/3 tsp baking powder

1/3 tsp salt

1/3-1/2 cups water; more of a guideline, just add enough so you can make a soft dough

2 Tbs oil (high heat oil like rape seed, olive not reccomended)

It works best with multiples of three, but as long as you get your flour : oil : water balance right, and mix carefully you can do no wrong.

Mix the dry ingredients together fully, then add your oil. I used grapeseed, which tastes a little odd by itself and comes from Argentina and Portugal (I don't understand how exactly that works), but again it was just what I had on hand. When school rolls around we'll make more sustainable food choices.

Your flour mix should get kinda crumbly, kind of like cornmeal. Its ok to really mix it in there; don't worry about the gluten getting over developed because its just fat.

Add your water in small additions and mix carefully.

If you add all the water your dough may well be too sticky, so treat it as a guideline. When you've got a good dough going, knead it for about ten minutes. I made this recipe with 9 cups of flour, so kneading was a serious workout; but hopefully it will help me fend off that carpal tunnel syndrome.

Your dough should be so soft that you can make it into a baby.

Cover your baby in a clean, wet towel (or a clean, wet teeshirt if no one has done laudry for your kitchen cloths all summer) and let it rest for a good 15 minutes. This will let your gluten relax, and will make the dough more manageable when you're rolling it out.

Knead your dough baby for another minute, then lovingly cut it to small pieces. You want them to be a little larger than a golf ball, but much smaller than a tennis ball.

Roll them into nice even balls, then watch this cute little old lady show you how to roll them:

This is what the internet is for.

At about 29 seconds in you can observe her technique:

1. she rolls it out one direction

2. she flips in and rotates about 45 degrees

3. she repeats this process.

The key wisdom from grama is to not roll from the center, or rotate your pin mid-roll, but press ever onward, and flip the tortilla around when it needs new direction.

Then heat 'em up. We have well seasoned cast iron so we didn't really need to oil our pan. Don't let them get as brown as the picture, or they'll crack when you try to roll them.

Eat them with whatever you like, but nothing beats beans, greens, and rice in my book. The collards were straight from the garden and almost sweet, I sautéed 'em with some onions and garlic, and I threw in some beans from a food box that had been laying around for over a year. I made the rice with a little salt, lemon pepper, and nutritional yeast in the water from the start. It was delicious.

Like grama said, you can also shallow fry these to make some killer fry bread. I added a little cinnamon sugar, and I ate almost 4 to myself. Dangerously tasty.