homemade tortillas for my people

...and my waistline

First, if you’re just here for the recipe, here it is – click the footnote¹ to jump right to it.

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My people invented the tortilla, and you’re welcome, America.

Actually, hang on...

(Googles history of tortillas…scrolls...)

Yeah, my people totally invented the tortilla.

I can’t imagine a land without tortillas, so if a dystopian future awaits us, I want to be ready.

Tortillas have always been there for me. When stealing a few minutes between college classes, or waking up with a heavy head on a beach in Mexico, tortillas came through. On a rushed afternoon or at the end of a long day without much food, emergency meal #1 got the call: I’d open the fridge and fry up a quick quesadilla if time allowed, or a microwaved one if it didn’t. In a real pinch, a rolled tortilla in my hand on the way out the door would suffice.

Tortillas: The world’s most versatile edible vessel.

I get antsy when our tortilla stock runs low. I can use them for a dozen meals and I swear Taco Loco knows it. Our locally made Taco Loco tortillas are the best around, but they’re not what they used to be. My older kids (who are lifelong tortilla fans as well; if you train a child in the way they should go...) and I began noticing that the store-bought tortillas were getting smaller even as the price increased. That was a problem for us.

Another problem with the store brands is that they use soybean oil, thiamine mononitrate, calcium propionate, sodium acid pyrophosphate, fumaric acid, and mono- and di-glycerides² in their recipes.³

Now, for many years I couldn’t have cared less about those ingredients. Gen-X was raised on Fruity Pebbles, individually-wrapped plastic cheese slices, and margarine over Eggo Waffles, which would never mold if you left them out; they just dried into petrified Styrofoam.

Bready things should mold! I’m looking at you, Quarter Pounder with cheese.

In high school, my nutritional food pyramid included mini powdered donuts and microwaved burritos. A box of Sour Patch Kids and a Super Big Gulp of Mountain Dew for breakfast every morning kept me grinding. On large cash flow days I’d supplement with one of those 7-11 jalapeno cheese dogs, the kind that had been rolling around those little warming rotisserie bars for hours. Somehow Gen-X survived that diet of sugar-saturated Rice Krispies and Taco Bell Meximelts without middle-school obesity (we are a hardy folk) yet, in the words of Indiana Jones, “It’s not the years, it’s the mileage.”

Once I reached my forties, those miles of jalapeno cheese dogs finally caught up with me. I noticed the bathroom scale was no longer a friend and I started connecting the dots.

Despite having abandoned Mountain Dew and almost every boxed food by then, all those sneaky ingredients in our common staples — like tortillas — were adding up. By adding up, I mean they were making me chubby. And the unnaturally manufactured oils and fats were perhaps the prime culprits.

Another uncomfortable truth: Chubby husbands have less fun than slim ones who don’t break the bathroom scale. Losing a few pounds would be good for my marriage, relieve some stress on my long abused body, and keep me around long enough to meet the future grandkids someday.

I was motivated, and that meant something had to be done about the tortillas, because casting them off wasn’t an option. There had to be another way.

So I tried making a batch of my own, which worked but was a pain. I went back to buying the Taco Loco ones and figured I’d find different way to shed those ten pounds.

And then one night Hispanic pride collided head on with my middle class laziness.

It was Mexican night at our home church’s weekly potluck, and one of the women brought homemade flour tortillas. She fed our grateful clan to rave reviews. As I sat there eating one of her scrumptious creations, I raised my fist to the ceiling fan — like Scarlet O’Hara to the burning Georgia sunset — and declared that as God was my witness, I wasn’t about to be culinarily bested by a gringo.

In that determined amalgamation where Mexican machismo intersects with the will of a praying esposa, I set out to make the tortillas again. Bigger! Better! Bolder! Further up and further in!

I set aside one day of the week, just a one-hour block of time, and put on my headphones. I selected a podcast of the same duration, and got to work. Victory. Homemade goodness with five ingredients that won’t shave my lifespan or result in my wife giving my middle-aged Mexican body that unsatisfied side-eye.

Now it’s just another thing I do every week. Soon I’ll have the kids doing the same, just like we did with homemade bread a few years back. Taco shells are probably next on the list (they’re a whole different beast) and after that, pasta. We take the steps as we can.

In making my own tortillas, I took one little step closer to the healthy traditions of my ancestors, and one step away from the people slowly eroding those traditions with nutritionally bankrupt conveniences out of a plastic bag.

1. Here’s the recipe: Five ingredients, that’s all. Oh and you absolutely need a cast-iron comal (flat pan). Don’t fret, you can also use it to deflect bullets and whack bad guys over the head.

Ingredients:

3 cups of flour
1 1/2 tbsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
1 cup warm water
1/2 cup olive oil

Makes 10-15 depending on size. I always double this recipe.

1. Mix the dry ingredients. Add the water and mix with a spatula. Add some oil and mix again until it’s elastic. Add more oil until it no longer sticks to your hands or the rolling surface.

   

2. Pull out some dough and roll it into a ball in your hand. Should be about the same amount you use for a cookie – a real cookie, not some weenie Greenwich tea shop cookie. I mean the size of cookie your husband will steal off the baking sheet when you’re not looking.

   

3. Roll the ball into a sheet as thin as you can get it, or as large as your pan will accommodate.

4. Carefully peel the dough off of the rolling surface and quickly transfer it to the pan. If it tears, ball it up and try again, rolling it less thin. You’ll probably need to straighten out the edges once it gets into the pan. Prepare for your first several tortillas to be ugly; you’ll get the hang of it.

   

5. Cook for a minute or so on medium low heat until you see golden spots form on the underside. Flip and cook for another minute or so until the other side looks the same.

6. Stack onto a dry cutting board to cool. Package once cool, so they don’t steam up the storage container. And refrigerate, or they will probably mold within a week. In our house they don’t last that long.

2. See this post about family controversy over my grandma’s taco ingredients.

3. Taco Loco ingredient list: WHOLE WHEAT FLOUR, BLEACHED ENRICHED FLOUR (WHEAT FLOUR, MALTED BARLEY FLOUR, NIACIN, REDUCED IRON, THIAMINE MONONITRATE, RIBOFLAVIN, FOLIC ACID), WATER, SOYBEAN OIL, CONTAINS LESS THAN 2% OF THE FOLLOWING: SALT, CALCIUM PROPIONATE (PRESERVATIVE), SODIUM BICARBONATE, SODIUM ACID PYROPHOSPHATE, SUGAR, FUMARIC ACID, MONO & DIGLYCERIDE, RICE FLOUR, MONOCALCIUM PHOSPHATE, GUAR GUM, ENZYMES, L-CYSTEINE AND SODIUM METABISULFITE (DOUGH CONDITIONERS).