Tortillas
I'm guessing most serious home cooks have made attempts at making foods that are cheap and readily available at the grocery store just to see if the homemade version is worth the effort. I have. My list of experiments includes pasta (not worth it), yogurt (worth it), canned tomatoes (not), bread (absolutely), crackers (nope), sauerkraut (yes, and don't even think of buying the stuff in little green cans). Maybe I'm a really bad pasta maker. My latest addition to this list is corn tortillas and the verdict is... two thumbs up.
Decades ago, when Martha and I lived in St. Louis, we went to a Mexican restaurant that made their own tortillas - maybe it's still there. While you waited for your table you could watch a woman press the dough into thin circles and flip them onto a rotating griddle. They arrived at your table steaming in a special container. They served those instead of chips! As I think about it now they were probably flour tortillas, but they became a Holy Grail for me - tender, elastic and bringing their own flavor to the party. Years later I attempted to make tortillas with no guidance and no recipe, a project fueled by ignorance and a severe case of confidence. I mixed water with some regular cornmeal and rapidly failed, putting tortillas in the "don't even try" column.
When my wife was diagnosed with celiac disease, and we found ourselves eating more corn tortillas, that unsatisfied feeling came back. We find most of the store brands to be bland and fragile. I spent considerable time and energy trying to track down the best one, and we ended up fairly happy with Mission tortillas. They are more supple/durable than most, but compared to my reference point they were still dull and lifeless.
I was reintroduced to hand made tortillas on our trip to Costa Rica in the spring of 2017. Our first night we stayed at a vacation home rental that had caretakers: Anna and her husband Francisco. We had been told that if we brought fish, cabbage, tomatoes, blackened ripe plantains and masa corn flour, Anna would make a taco dinner for us. We followed those instructions with precision except for the part where we were supposed to arrive at a reasonable hour. Anna made a quick fried fish dinner, including her own leftover rice and beans, and sent us to bed saying we'd get tortillas with breakfast.
I'm a light sleeper, so when you put me in a house built like a big screened porch near an ocean crashing on the beach and a rooster doing his duty, I'm wide awake around 5:00. No one else in my family was troubled, so I went for a quick beach walk. Then I made a run to the grocery store for eggs, coffee and more fruit. When I returned, Anna was puttering in the kitchen and I got my tortilla lesson.
The fact that she knew no English and I was equipped with little more than menu Spanish, was no obstacle. She lit a flame under a large iron skillet, then used her hand to measure some masa flour into a bowl. She added water directly from the tap and began mixing with her hand, slowly adding more water and mixing until she had a mass of dough. She kneaded this a few times then kneaded in a little more flour. From this Anna pinched off a lump and handed it to me so that I could examine the texture - it was soft and pliable but not sticky.
She then took a pair of scissors and cut two pieces of plastic from the grocery bag I had just come in with, each maybe 12 inches square. She placed a ball of dough, smaller than a lime, larger than a golf ball, between the pieces of plastic and pressed down against the counter with her palm to flatten it. Then, using the tips of her fingers and a rotating motion, she gradually thinned out the tortilla, flipping the assembly over and pressing and rotating some more, until the dough was kind of round and about 1/8 inch thick, maybe a little thicker. The plastic was peeled off and the circle of dough went into the skillet with a practiced draping motion while she started on the next tortilla. The first one was flipped for another minute or two of cooking, then transferred to a plate with a damp towel to cover. In went tortilla number two and in this manner Anna worked her way through the dough, producing about a dozen tortillas. Maybe Anna's tortillas were "Costa Rican style" - thicker than we are used to and uneven, but the texture and flavor were great.
For the rest of that trip I tried to master the Anna method with serviceable results. And when we got home the project continued with masa readily available at our grocery store. We have not bought packaged tortillas since.
Buy a bag of masa flour and go for it. Most of the directions you'll need are on the package. The dough should be just on the dry side of sticky. I now use a rolling pin with the plastic technique Anna showed me, and I roll the dough out thinner. If you like gadgets or need a gift idea, buy a tortilla press. Letting the hot tortillas rest in a container for a few minutes is essential to the cooking process. You can use a special tortilla "warmer" for this, but a plate over a pie pan works too. This is still cheating compared to the old, traditional method of making tortillas, but I've pretty much given up on ever tasting those. For us, the ratio of labor to product in this method is great - the flavor, texture and durability of these tortillas is vastly better than packaged. But there's more.. I've made an interesting addition.
After several rounds of tortilla making here at home with an iron skillet a memory came bubbling up one day. There was that flat iron thing in the basement that Dad had given me a few years ago that looked like some kind of camp fire griddle. "I bet that would make a great tortilla maker!" I dug it out of a box, cleaned it up, and started using it. It was kind of spooky how well it worked. It fit over two burners, and was just the right shape to hold two tortillas at once. And the shallow lip made flipping them with a spatula easier than with a skillet. "Wait a minute..." I looked more carefully at the writing on it. One side was unintelligible, but the other clearly said "SULTANA." Two internet minutes later I knew that I had a comal - a tortilla griddle, and that the unintelligible writing said, "HECHO EN MEXICO." Why would Mom and Dad have ever had one of these? I asked Dad and the answer was he didn't know. "Maybe someone left it behind at a pot luck." At the risk of losing it, if this belongs to you, talk to George.
Postscript: We just had a bunch of folks over for a Cinco de Mayo taco night, and it gave me an opportunity to test something. Somewhere I read about adding pureed hominy to the masa. I've done it before, but since I was making a lot of tortillas it gave me a chance to make two different batches and taste them side by side. I took a 29 oz. can of white hominy (drained and rinsed,) and pureed it in a blender with about 1/2 cup water. I put this in a bowl and added about three cups of masa. Then proceeded normally from there, adding more water until the dough was the right consistency. The verdict is that this makes a better tortilla. The texture is better with those al dente bits of corn in there, and they seem more elastic. It's an extra step you can skip if you just need tortillas for family dinner, but worth it for guests.
Decades ago, when Martha and I lived in St. Louis, we went to a Mexican restaurant that made their own tortillas - maybe it's still there. While you waited for your table you could watch a woman press the dough into thin circles and flip them onto a rotating griddle. They arrived at your table steaming in a special container. They served those instead of chips! As I think about it now they were probably flour tortillas, but they became a Holy Grail for me - tender, elastic and bringing their own flavor to the party. Years later I attempted to make tortillas with no guidance and no recipe, a project fueled by ignorance and a severe case of confidence. I mixed water with some regular cornmeal and rapidly failed, putting tortillas in the "don't even try" column.
When my wife was diagnosed with celiac disease, and we found ourselves eating more corn tortillas, that unsatisfied feeling came back. We find most of the store brands to be bland and fragile. I spent considerable time and energy trying to track down the best one, and we ended up fairly happy with Mission tortillas. They are more supple/durable than most, but compared to my reference point they were still dull and lifeless.
I'm a light sleeper, so when you put me in a house built like a big screened porch near an ocean crashing on the beach and a rooster doing his duty, I'm wide awake around 5:00. No one else in my family was troubled, so I went for a quick beach walk. Then I made a run to the grocery store for eggs, coffee and more fruit. When I returned, Anna was puttering in the kitchen and I got my tortilla lesson.
The fact that she knew no English and I was equipped with little more than menu Spanish, was no obstacle. She lit a flame under a large iron skillet, then used her hand to measure some masa flour into a bowl. She added water directly from the tap and began mixing with her hand, slowly adding more water and mixing until she had a mass of dough. She kneaded this a few times then kneaded in a little more flour. From this Anna pinched off a lump and handed it to me so that I could examine the texture - it was soft and pliable but not sticky.
She then took a pair of scissors and cut two pieces of plastic from the grocery bag I had just come in with, each maybe 12 inches square. She placed a ball of dough, smaller than a lime, larger than a golf ball, between the pieces of plastic and pressed down against the counter with her palm to flatten it. Then, using the tips of her fingers and a rotating motion, she gradually thinned out the tortilla, flipping the assembly over and pressing and rotating some more, until the dough was kind of round and about 1/8 inch thick, maybe a little thicker. The plastic was peeled off and the circle of dough went into the skillet with a practiced draping motion while she started on the next tortilla. The first one was flipped for another minute or two of cooking, then transferred to a plate with a damp towel to cover. In went tortilla number two and in this manner Anna worked her way through the dough, producing about a dozen tortillas. Maybe Anna's tortillas were "Costa Rican style" - thicker than we are used to and uneven, but the texture and flavor were great.
For the rest of that trip I tried to master the Anna method with serviceable results. And when we got home the project continued with masa readily available at our grocery store. We have not bought packaged tortillas since.
Buy a bag of masa flour and go for it. Most of the directions you'll need are on the package. The dough should be just on the dry side of sticky. I now use a rolling pin with the plastic technique Anna showed me, and I roll the dough out thinner. If you like gadgets or need a gift idea, buy a tortilla press. Letting the hot tortillas rest in a container for a few minutes is essential to the cooking process. You can use a special tortilla "warmer" for this, but a plate over a pie pan works too. This is still cheating compared to the old, traditional method of making tortillas, but I've pretty much given up on ever tasting those. For us, the ratio of labor to product in this method is great - the flavor, texture and durability of these tortillas is vastly better than packaged. But there's more.. I've made an interesting addition.
After several rounds of tortilla making here at home with an iron skillet a memory came bubbling up one day. There was that flat iron thing in the basement that Dad had given me a few years ago that looked like some kind of camp fire griddle. "I bet that would make a great tortilla maker!" I dug it out of a box, cleaned it up, and started using it. It was kind of spooky how well it worked. It fit over two burners, and was just the right shape to hold two tortillas at once. And the shallow lip made flipping them with a spatula easier than with a skillet. "Wait a minute..." I looked more carefully at the writing on it. One side was unintelligible, but the other clearly said "SULTANA." Two internet minutes later I knew that I had a comal - a tortilla griddle, and that the unintelligible writing said, "HECHO EN MEXICO." Why would Mom and Dad have ever had one of these? I asked Dad and the answer was he didn't know. "Maybe someone left it behind at a pot luck." At the risk of losing it, if this belongs to you, talk to George.
Postscript: We just had a bunch of folks over for a Cinco de Mayo taco night, and it gave me an opportunity to test something. Somewhere I read about adding pureed hominy to the masa. I've done it before, but since I was making a lot of tortillas it gave me a chance to make two different batches and taste them side by side. I took a 29 oz. can of white hominy (drained and rinsed,) and pureed it in a blender with about 1/2 cup water. I put this in a bowl and added about three cups of masa. Then proceeded normally from there, adding more water until the dough was the right consistency. The verdict is that this makes a better tortilla. The texture is better with those al dente bits of corn in there, and they seem more elastic. It's an extra step you can skip if you just need tortillas for family dinner, but worth it for guests.
Comments
Post a Comment