Wheat-Flour Tortillas (Tortillas de Harina)

For my first official recipe, I thought I'd start off with something fairly easy. We were also low on flour tortillas for the normal Saturday lunch I make: burritos made with whatever we have in the refrigerator. We had leftover rice and chicken fajita meat from dinner Friday night, and I planned to roll it up and reheat it in tortillas, but I needed tortillas to do that.

Here's the mise:

Those of you who have the cookbook will note that the recipe calls for lard or shortening (shiver), and there is nothing that looks like either of those in the picture. Whenever we can, we use pork fat that is left over after we make pulled pork instead of butter or lard -- it's like lard, but it has additional spices and pork-y goodness in it. (A friend of ours once asked us, "You mean on toast? That sounds awesome!" Not yet, but he may well be right...) So, you might notice some weird flecks in some of the pictures -- that's just extra flavor, not a dirty kitchen.

Anyway, I added the pork fat to the flour and worked them together by hand. Bayless says to make sure the fat is "completely incorporated." That posed a bit of a problem for me, because can I ever get the fat "completely" incorporated? And what about those italics? Do they raise the bar, and, if so, how much? I decided that I had done enough there were no more clumps. You'll have to wait and see if it worked out. Here's what it looked like:

Next, I added the salt to the water, and guess what that looked like:

Pretty amazing, huh? I made a well in the flour/fat mixture and brought the dough together:


I kneaded the dough for a while. Bayless calls for kneading until the dough is "smooth." My dough never really got smooth, but I was worried about developing too much gluten, so I stopped when it looked like this:

Next, the recipe calls for making 12 balls of dough (for 12 tortillas). I read in another recipe that you can just keep dividing it in two until you get 12 balls, but I had a sneaking suspicion that wouldn't work, perhaps because I can multiply by two... Instead, I divided my ball into three sections:

And then I rolled those sections into balls, which I cut in half and then in half again. So that's how we get to 12! I covered the balls in plastic to rest at room temperature for 30 minutes:

The timing worked out well, because Charlie woke up hungry about that time. We have just introduced him to avocados, after rice cereal, apples, and sweet potatoes. It's not from Authentic Mexican, but, who really needs a recipe for mashed avocado? Here's his mise:

Pretty simple, huh? This is the final dish. I think it looks good!

What did he think? Well, let's just say he liked it much better than his first taste of apples:

Those were Fuji, and we found he is much happier with Red Delicious. Anyway, with baby back to happy mode, I could get back to the tortillas. I rolled them out into rounds (roughly 7"), and cooked them on a cast-iron griddle:


As you can see, some got a bit burned, but others looked really good:

Here's the stack:

We ate two of them immediately with some avocado and a touch of salsa (a modified version of the Bayless chipotle chile sauce), and I made burritos with a couple more. Overall, we thought they were very good, and much better than store-bought.

I can see Bayless's point that the tortillas made with only lard are a bit on the heavy side, but I don't believe in vegetable shortening. I may try these again with a bit of canola oil mixed into the pork fat to lighten it up a bit. We'll see how that works.

Sources:
All-purpose flour from King Arthur Flour
Avocado from El Tiempo Market