Corn tortillas

When I was a child, the world was not yet the international hotpot that it now is. Sure, I grew up with parents from different countries, and was exposed to foods from many more countries. It just was not as wide a range of foods as can easily be experienced now. So food from Mexico or the South West (of the US) was an eye-opening experience when I had the privilege of living in the US. It is also far more interesting and diverse than what you typically get exposed to as ‘Mexican’ food in Europe. At any rate, I still love adding a touch of what I experienced into my cooking now. But have also given up finding a reliable commercial source for even tortilla flatbreads. So I decided to experiment a little, combining ideas from different places into something that works for me, on many levels. I am well aware that for authentic Mexican tortillas you need the special corn flour. But I cannot get that here, and I find it a nice compromise to then do a soft-corn-flour-tortilla version instead.

Makes 12 tortillas

375 ml plain white flour

250 ml wholemeal flour (not coarse)

250 ml fine cornmeal / polenta

300 – 350 ml warm water

50 ml vegetable oil

Salt

Sift the flours and salt into a large bowl. Make a well in the centre of the bowl and add approximately 200 ml of the warm water, then start mixing, adding more water as needed along the way. In the end you want a soft, smooth dough, that is not too wet or too dry. If you use a machine for the mixing, try using a dough hook and knead the dough with this for 2-5 min.

Leave the dough to rest for 15 min. to 2 hours, covered in a tea towel. If you need to leave it for longer, you should make sure the tea towel is damp, so the dough does not dry out.

Divide the dough into 12 equal pieces. Heat a frying pan to medium-high heat while you start rolling out the dough thinly. The dough should end up about 1 mm thick: thin, but so it is still possible to handle. Transfer to the frying pan. Fry the tortillas for 1-2 min on each side, then wrap in a tea-towel, while frying up the rest.

Alternatively, in the summer, you could fry them using the grill and a pizza stone – just careful to use indirect heat in this case.

Note 1: If you have any left over, you can freeze them, just place a little baking paper in between the tortillas, for ease of separating them later. Make sure to freeze them lying flat – or they will remain bent until you defrost them…

Then, when you want to eat them, let them defrost before heating them gently in the oven (at 150°C), wrapped in foil, when you want to eat them.

Note 2: you do not use oil for frying them, they will not stick if they have a little flour on the surface when you transfer them.

PS Sorry, I know the dish I serve the tortillas with here is not true to the South-West theme, but it still tasted good!