My neighbour Caroline sent me home with her barely used tortilla press the other day. Today, she came by with a giant container of corn flour and a recipe, so I decided to try my hand at making tortillas!

The recipe for 16 to 20 tortillas is super simple:
2 cups corn flour
2 cups boiling water
1/2 tsp salt

Mix in a big bowl until you get a ball, cover with plastic wrap, and let sit for an hour. Then divide into 1 1/2 inch balls that you press and then cook on a hot griddle/cast iron pan/comal.

So here is her press:

It has a hinge on the side. You open up the two halves, put a ball of dough in the middle between plastic (to prevent sticking — she uses two halves of a Ziploc bag), press firmly to flatten the ball, peel the resulting raw tortilla off the plastic and plop it into a very hot frying pan (I use well seasoned cast iron, so I don’t add any grease) to get this:

Rather impressive looking for a first attempt, no?

This was nothing like the tortillas I get at the tortilleria in Maz. Neither is better or worse, they are just different. The main difference is that these are cooked in a cast iron pan, so they are crunchier and have brown spots (the best part). But I usually heat up my tortillas anyway and get close to this result.

The colour is also different. These came out very yellow, like tostadas. The tortillas I get at the tortilleria are beige.

Finally, these were a little bitter. I think the flour might be a little old, or it’s just not the same flour used in the tortillerias. It definitely has a much more pronounced corn flavour. They are going to make killer totopos (fried tortilla chips)! I want to repeat the experiment with proper Maseca brand flour to see if I get closer to the tortilleria tortillas.

But the final verdict is that making these was most definitely worth my time. I didn’t like them much on their own (bitter), but were really good slathered with a little leftover tomato sauce! They are a little fluffy in the middle and feel like wheat bread under tooth (!).

I scoffed at the idea of a tortilla press, but it really is labour saving. Imagine the work and space that would have been needed to roll out the dough into a semblance of a circle!

I only made three tonight and saved the rest of the ball of dough for tomorrow morning. Making tortillas is a lot less work than making flat bread with flour and I look forward to making mountains of them this summer. Considering the price of crappy corn tortillas at the grocery store, the time spent will be worth it!

So yay for Caroline for giving me a chance to try this out before buying Maseca!