Tortillas from Scratch

Posted May 17, 2010

Find more about tortillas , corn

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Isn't that kind of rustic and fabulous? Also, if you want me to embroider a little flower on your dish towel, go ahead and send it to me. I'll get to it just as soon as I'm done with the one I'm working on now, by 2019 at the latest.

Two ingredients: masa harina and water.

The dough starts out less promising. . .

. . . and quickly becomes more promising. It looks like my masa harina is made from white corn, right? I think it must be.

These photos are from a few different tortilla-making incidents. Here, the kids were helping shape the balls for a party. We made lots and lots of tortillas, which was kind of fun/kind of a pain.

Here, Birdy's helping me make up just a half batch for a simple family dinner.

One pressing episode.

And another. I wash and dry the plastic and store it inside my pie plate for next time.

A tortilla ready to go on the griddle.

And here are some cooking, at various stages of doneness.

Here was our dinner: tortillas, beans with leftover brown rice stirred into them, cheese, and a simple salad.

You can fill them, or tear pieces for scooping, or keep everything separate.

Everybody is happy.

Because everybody is always happy. Or so my memories tell me.

If you've known me for a while, then you understand how crazy it must be for me to write this food column without diverging constantly into the other aspects of life that are streaming constantly past. Which is why I diverge so often, and ride my little raft over from the pond of family cooking into the white water rapids of life and feelings. I try to make it all fit together, and it often does.

And sometimes it doesn't. Like today. I am writing about corn tortillas, which are so incredibly satisfying to make. I won't drive you all crazy by calling them easy--although they are, once you get the hang of them. And obviously it is much simpler and certainly a perfectly fine everyday idea to open up a package of store-bought ones. But making them yourself is deeply satisfying, and the resulting tortillas are so, so good: thick, soft, burnished by heat, and tasting deeply of corn. And if you have great tortillas, then it's insanely easy to build a meal around them: melt some Monterey jack onto them, and serve the quesadillas with shredded cabbage or lettuce and some salsa and sour cream. Or else give everyone a couple of tortillas and a pile of beans or sliced steak, and let them scoop and assemble as they wish. Or eat them hot off the griddle, spread simply with melting butter--and make another plan for dinner.

You don't need a tortilla press. That's the main thing I want to be sure you understand. When I first started making them with Ziplocs and a pie plate, I put a tortilla press on my Amazon wish list, and thought "One day." But then I removed it, because you know what? I can't imagine anything more satisfying than watching the tortilla spread beneath the little Pyrex viewing area of the plate. I love the ad hoc feeling of it--the frugality of using something you already have.

And none of that has anything to do with the fact that while I was typing up the recipe here just now, Michael was sorting some old video tapes upstairs, and I went up just in time to see fluffy-haired, striped-shirted three-year-old Birdy drawing on her Magna-doodle. "I'm jawing babies, right Daddy? I like babies the most. I like jawing babies the most. Right Daddy?" Then she ran around in circles on the living room carpet singing, "I love you, I love you, I love you! I'm singing a song about I love you, right Daddy?"

What is that feeling? I mean, she's such a great kid--bright and kind and home and ours and smelling still of baby shampoo and strawberries and mown grass. It's not like I'm watching these videos while she's busy downstairs turning our basement into a meth lab. But something squeezes inside my chest when I see her in all her monumental littleness. The glorious warmth and uncomplicated joy of toddlerhood, of a squeaky voice that has nothing but loving thoughts to narrate. Which is such a false memory. I'm seeing it even as I type the words. That's how nostalgia is, isn't it. It's like a tide that washes up only the beautiful shells and glowing sea glass, and it washes away the footprints of a three-year-old storming off in a tantrum about string cheese and napping. It washes away the trash and the ugly, mollusk-encrusted seaweed and the poisonous clumps of maternal impatience and it leaves this sparkling beach of memories, and I just want to lie down on it and feel the pounding of my own happy, aching heart.

Corn Tortillas
Makes 15 tortillas
Active time: 30 minutes; total time: 1 hour

This recipe is adapted from the Rick Bayless book Authentic Mexican, which is a book I really like. Masa harina is fine, lime-treated corn flour that you can find in the Mexican-foods section of any large supermarket or natural foods store; I use Masa Brosa brand, but only because that's what there was--I don't have any particular brand allegiance. To make enough only for dinner for a family of four, halve the recipe and make 8 tortillas. (Of course, if you've got time, it's better to make the full recipe and store leftovers in the fridge in a Ziploc--but it's much quicker to make half.) Also: I want credit for another recipe with NO SALT in it.

1 3/4 cups masa harina (corn flour)
1 cup hot tap water

Stir together the masa harina and water, then knead it on the counter until it's smooth, adding more water or masa harina as needed to make a soft but not sticky dough. (Sometimes I just knead it around a bit in the bowl, without even dumping it out.) Cover with plastic wrap or a bowl cover, and let it rest for 30 minutes.

Check the rested dough: it should be quite soft, so that you can press it without the edges cracking, but not so sticky that you won't be able to handle the uncooked tortillas--a bit of a trial-and-error situation, but one with low stakes, since the ingredients are inexpensive. Divide the dough into 15 balls (a fun job for a child!) and keep them covered while you work.

If you have a tortilla press, then do whatever you need to do to prepare it. If you don't, then cut a gallon-size Ziploc freezer bag into two large squares of plastic and get out a Pyrex pie plate. This will be your makeshift press--and it will work beautifully.

Now, heat a cast iron griddle or a pair of frying pans that can stand high heat. One side of the griddle or one pan should be on high heat, and the other should be on medium-low heat.

Press the tortillas: place a ball of dough between the two squares of plastic, then press down with the pie plate, smashing and rocking it a bit to get the tortilla nice and flat. Peel it off of the plastic carefully (peel the top plastic off first, then flip it so the tortilla is in your palm and peel off the other plastic square), then slap it onto the cooler frying pan or the cooler side of the griddle. After 30 seconds or so, the tortilla will be dry enough to move easily, and you should flip it onto the hot side of the griddle (or the hotter pan), where you'll cook it until it's browning in spots before flipping it and browning the first side. Did you follow that? Side A down on cooler griddle; flip to side B down on hot griddle; flip to side A down again on hot griddle. Rick Bayless says this should be about 30 seconds a side, but I end up leaving mine on the hot griddle for about a minute a side: you want them to really start to brown and to puff up a little like a pita bread. It's quite a lovely experience once you get the hang of it.

Speaking of getting the hang of it, there's a rhythm that will develop naturally once your confidence grows: you will press a tortilla and lay it on the cooler part of the griddle; you will press another and flip the first tortilla onto the hotter part of the griddle and lay the new one on the cooler side; you will press another tortilla and flip the first one on the hot side, flip the second one onto the hot side, and lay the third one down on the cooler side, etc. Following?

Keep the finished tortillas wrapped in a dish towel until you're ready to eat them. I find they can actually hold this way for a couple of hours, but if you need to reheat them, you can wrap the tortillas and their dish towel in foil and heat them in a very low oven for a while. To reheat refrigerated homemade or store-bought tortillas, wrap them in a clean, heavy dish towel and place in a steamer basket over 1/2 inch of water, then bring to a boil, covered, over medium-high heat. Steam for 1 minute, then remove from the fire and let stand 15 or 20 additional minutes.

Get a printable version of this recipe.

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Tortillas from Scratch

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by Catherine Newman

Catherine Newman cooks for the family

Dalai Mama Dishes

Catherine Newman cooks for the family

Tortillas from Scratch

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