Smells like San Antonio

I love tortillas. Wait... let me rephrase that. I love homemade tortillas. Those cardboard things that they sell at the grocery store are not tortillas. I'm not sure what to call them, but they bear little resemblance to the tortillas that I'm talking about.

When I lived in San Antonio, any Mexican restaurant worth going to made their own tortillas, and you could often watch the process. Then I moved to Oklahoma City - the land of the cardboard "tortillas". One day, a friend said she was going to Ted's. I said, "Ted who?". It turns out, that OKC has the most AMAZING Mexican restaurant called Ted's Escondito. I was thrilled that I could now have yummy Mexican food with real tortillas.

However, since Ted's is very rarely in our budget these days, I decided to look into making my own. Most recipes call for lard. I'm sure these tortillas are delicious, but it just seems so unhealthy. Then I found a recipe that use canola oil in place of lard. They sounded like the place to start.

They're really easy. Only 5 ingredients: flour, canola oil, salt, baking powder, and water.

Mix together 3 cups of flour, 1 teaspoon salt, and 1/2 teaspoon baking powder. Add the canola oil and mix until the mixture looks like fine crumbs. This is messy work - I used my hands, and ended up with more dough on my hands than in the bowl. I scraped the dough back into the bowl and added 1 cup of hot water, and mixed until a ball formed. The recipe said to let rest at least 30 minutes. Now, I've failed at making tortillas in the past, and I think it was because I didn't let the dough rest long enough. So, covered the dough with plastic wrap and put it in the fridge. I intended to make the tortillas about 4 hours later. However, as often happens, plans changed. I didn't have a chance to make the tortillas until about 24 hours later. Oh, well!
I got a tortilla press from my parents earlier this year (thanks, Mom & Dad!)

Their intended purpose is making corn tortillas, but I wanted to try to use it for flour tortillas.


It worked to get the tortillas into a round shape, but I still had to roll them to make them as thin as they need to be. Which is thin. Really, really thin.

Once they're super thin, I put them on a hot skillet. Mine is cast iron.

Flip when it looks like this:

This recipe should make about 12 tortillas. They're good with anything. Tonight we had them with fajitas. My favorite is one fresh out of the skillet with butter, dipped in salsa. Yum!