The he in this case being Robert “El Mariachi, Spy Kids, Sin City …” Rodriguez. A couple of days ago I wrote about his 10 Minute Cooking School. Today I made Sin City Breakfast Tacos. I didn’t follow the instructions completely. The part where he talks about the store bought, taste like rubber tortillas “get ‘em out of your fridge and throw them in the trash, they’re garbage“. I didn’t have any so I didn’t do that. But I did follow the 2 cups flour, half teaspoon salt, half teaspoon baking powder (not soda), quarter cup fat, three quarter cup hot water recipe for making tortillas like his grandma did. It was easy. My only change was to use half butter and half vegan shortning – made of palm oil. I wanted my vegetarian wife to enjoy the tortillas so lard was out. For the mixing of the fat and flour mix using your hands (instead of a pastry cutter or your mixer) is a great way to go. Squishing the fat into thinner and thinner pieces until you get that fine “cornmeal” texture adds some sensual pleasure to the process. When it’s time to add the hot water it helps to know the feeling of dough when it has just enough water mixed in. If you don’t know, the best hint that I have is that the whole dough won’t hold together until you knead it. So most of it should hold together. It’s also good to know the springy feel of kneaded dough. But you don’t need any hints about that. His demo in the video is pretty good and shows a variety of methods. Just keep kneading until your dough feels springy and alive and all of the parts that didn’t hold in at the start are now part of the dough ball.
While the dough rests and rises for twenty minutes or so you can make the potato and egg filling. Or the egg/tomato/chili/onion filling. Or that whatever you feel like stuffing your homemade tortillas with filling.
And then you cook the tortillas. Robert gives great directions on how hot to have your griddle so watch the video this part is about 4m10s into the stream.
My first homemade tortillas. Damn they were good.
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