Make Tortillas, Make Friends
Or, an alternative to meeting for coffee.
If you want to cement a budding friendship, invite the person over to make tortillas. It’s a cool and fun thing to do! In fact, I’m pretty sure this is how I won over my friend Alice one rainy day a few years ago.
Like skydiving or drag racing, tortilla-making isn’t for everyone. While there’s little risk of death from rolling out balls of dough and cooking them on a pan, it’s still one of those activities where someone will either be like, Hell yeah! This is gonna be so great! or Wouldn’t it be easier to just buy them at the store?
I already knew that Alice was firmly in the Hell yeah! camp, because she had previously made my family a batch of freshly-griddled sourdough English muffins. And also, because she, like me, thought it would be totally reasonable to try to cook huge quantities of tortillas with our five-year-olds in the other room, because we assumed they would play for several hours without disturbing us. (It did not go this way.)
If you’ve spent any time around little kids, you might be able to guess how it actually went. Things started off really well for the first 15 minutes. Then one kid got whiney, then the other got whiney, and we spent the rest of the time trying to engage them in an activity and flip tortillas over a flaming hot stove at the same time. It’s what moms do!
Alice has been one of my dear friends since that day. We even still sometimes try to cook with the kids around (they’re older now, and it’s much easier), but more often our food projects are confined to the quiet weekday hours when everyone else is out of the house.
The tortillas I’m sharing today are a little different than the ones Alice and I made back then, when I was a new tortilla cooker. These use a blend of wheat and corn, plus they have whole flaxseeds for…fun? Nutrition? I just like them. They are completely non-traditional but excellent with black beans, tacos of all sorts, quesadillas, breakfast tacos, or just plain straight from the pan. And like my homemade pasta, you don’t need any special equipment — just a rolling pin.
Multigrain Tortillas
Makes 12 taco-sized tortillas
Ingredients
3/4 cup (155 grams) water
1/4 cup (42 grams) neutral oil
2 teaspoons (7 grams) salt
1 cup plus 2 tablespoons (155 grams) all-purpose flour
1/4 cup plus 2 tablespoons (55 grams) whole wheat flour
1/4 cup plus 2 tablespoons (50 grams) masa harina
2 tablespoons (10 grams) whole flaxseeds
Directions
Make the tortilla dough. Combine all of the ingredients in a large bowl. Use your hands to mix well to form a slightly sticky dough. Give it a few kneads inside the bowl to help things really come together.
Rest the dough. Cover the dough and let it rest for 30 minutes. Or refrigerate it for up to 24 hours. Resting will make the dough easier to roll out.
Divide the dough into 12 roughly equal pieces. Roll each piece into a ping pong-sized ball.
Bring a wide, shallow pan over medium heat. Your best option is something with a nonstick surface. It could be cast iron, ceramic nonstick, or even Teflon. I use my Teflon nonstick griddle pan, which allows me to make two tortillas at a time. I try not to stress about this too much because literally all of the other food I made gets cooked in stainless steel pans and a Dutch oven.
Prep your work surface while the pan heats up. Dust the countertop liberally with flour. Have a rolling pin and a spatula at the ready.
Start rolling. Place a dough ball in the center of your work surface. Dust it with flour and roll it out into a roughly 8-inch disc. Transfer it to your pan. Allow to cook for 45 second to 1 minute, until the tortilla is starting to bubble up and the underside has some brown spots, then flip and cook for the same amount of time on the other side. You can cook multiple tortillas at once if your pan is big enough.
Transfer the hot tortilla to a cutting board or plate and repeat, piling the cooked tortillas on top of each other until you’ve cooked all 12. All that steam keeps them hot and soft.
These tortillas are at their absolute best when they’re still warm. Or if you plan to eat them later, wrap them in a kitchen towel and tuck the kitchen towel in a plastic bag (old produce bags are ideal for this) to help the tortillas retain as much moisture as possible until you’re ready to eat.
Some more good things
I recently learned of the Worldwide Sidewalk Joy Project, which is basically a map of whimsical neighborhood spots like Little Free Libraries, mini galleries, puzzle exchanges, toy swaps, et cetera. The creator started the map for Portland and now there are spots listed all over the world — more than 6,000 right now. There are a few mapped spots in my neighborhood in Philly, and I can think of a few more that need to be added. Are there any near you, or ones that you’d add?