Doniree’s Test Kitchen: Viva Tortilla

Ok, maybe you won’t believe me, but this really isn’t an amateur attempt at a food blog. I’ve written about other interesting quasi-entertaining things like buying things, hating Nickelback, and Martha Stewart’s $1200 vibrator, and I really do enjoy a variety of different hobbies.

But I really, really love food. I love trying a restaurant I’ve never been to before, and I love experimental cooking in my self-titled Doniree’s Test Kitchen. I adore reading food blogs, especially by folks that live here and offer practical ideas and suggestions that are fun and easy to implement (my fave food blogs are in the blogroll).

I do promise to get back to a more well-rounded discussion of other interests, anecdotes, and exploration soon, but in the mean time… I couldn’t resist one more food post because I really have been spending an extraordinary amount of time cooking lately.

I just discovered the deliciousness of tortillas from scratch and I don’t think I’m ever going back to the packaged ones.  True story!

When I know I want to spend the evening playing in my kitchen, around 2pm in the afternoon, I start thinking about what I’m going to do. What do I have on hand? Do I need to pick anything up on my way home? Do I need to check a recipe for inspiration or should I just start throwing things together?

On Tuesday, this thought process went something like this:

I have tofu I’d like to use soon and I have that Thai Kitchen Pad Thai in my cupboard… I have eggs… and I could add things to it like other veggies… no, no, no, I want to cook from scratch tonight.

No boxes.

Hmm… but I do have peppers and onions, and some chicken. And I have some cilantro-lime rice leftover from when I made that fish last week… peppers, onions, and rice?  Sounds like a fajita burrito from Chipotle… mmm, but I bet mine would be way more healthy than that delicious gut-buster.

I bet I could do that at home. I mean, I know I have chicken. I wonder how they season it. Oooh, I wonder how they season the puerco - that is damn good!  Well, I can look around the grocery store and see what inspires me. I don’t have tortillas though. I wonder if I could make those from scratch. I have flour and salt and water. It can’t take much more than that, right?

Right!

I searched a bunch of recipes online for “homemade tortillas,” but every single recipe I found called for shortening (which I don’t have, and don’t really want to need to use), and most of them required that I let the dough rest for an hour or more.  Sorry, but I’m an instant gratification kind of person and just don’t have that kind of time.

So, I emailed Kate and asked for some input. Here’s what she told me:

We make scratch tortillas all the time and use flour, canola oil and water. Put two cups of flour in a bowl and add 1/4 cup of canola oil. With your fingers, mix the oil into the flour until it’s all incorporated, then pour in about 2/3- 3/4 cup of warm water. Mix with fingers until a dough ball is formed- add in more flour if too sticky. You should be able to roll them into balls without too much trouble. We let the dough balls rest for about 20 minutes. We have a big tortilla grill that presses out the dough. Otherwise you have to roll them out with a rolling pin.

I got right to work.

Here’s the bowl of flour before it became dough:

small mixing bowl for dough

And the little balls that I rolled it into:

tortilla balls!

I let them sit for 20 minutes while I started the peppers and onions, and then rolled them flat with my Super Fancy Rolling Pin empty bottle of Premium:

who needs a rolling pin when you have beer bottles?

The tortilla-ing continues:

beer bottle #1: rolling pin; beer bottle #2: mine

Mmmm… so good!

yummy tortillas!

Seriously, they’re the freshest (duh) tasting tortillas I’ve ever had and the extras reheated fine both yesterday and today.

I’m never going back.

Tagged as: home cooking, kitchen, tortillas