Month: April 2020

I Don’t Care If My Flour Tortillas Look Like Amoebas. I Am Never Buying Them At The Store Again.

I like flour tortillas. I’ve been eating them all my life. I’d buy them at the grocery and use them for Latin dishes, rolled sandwiches, whatever.

We’ve even used them cut with cookie cutters as a base for hors d’oeuvres. They can be a little expensive, maybe 30 or 40 cents apiece, but I never considered an alternative.

If I wanted a tortilla, I bought tortillas.

Not anymore, not after last night. Last night I made my own tortillas. The difference astounded me, and they were so easy that I wondered why I’d never made them before.

Last night’s batch, my first, were oblong and misshapen. And they did not fall flat on the pan when I cooked them, so they were wrinkled and lumpy in spots. On the plate they looked like a Mexican grandmother’s nightmare.

But they were so delicious that I didn’t care. They were nicely chewy, soft even after they cooled, and they held together well under last night’s fajitas.

I’m going to keep working at them and I know eventually they’ll look better, but I don’t know how I could ever make them taste better. They taste fantastic, in a completely different world than store-bought.

The recipe is here: https://www.mexicoinmykitchen.com/flour-tortillas-de-harina/ and there’s even a video to go with it. In that video you will see Mely Martinez’s expert hands turn out nearly perfect circles of dough that puff up, blowfish-like, when they hit the hot pan.

Mine did that, too, but they looked more like amoebas with intestinal problems than blowfish. In any event, I’ll bet they tasted just as good as hers, and so there’s no reason for you not to make them.

Her ingredients are flour, shortening, baking powder, water and salt, and she says not to worry if you don’t have the baking powder. You do want to take seriously her admonition to go easy on the hot water. I used about seven-eighths of a cup and I should have used a little less. The extra made the tortillas a bit harder to roll, but didn’t bother me otherwise.

I looked around and found several recipes that used less shortening — one used only an eighth of a cup rather than the one-third in Martinez’s recipe — but I’m going to stick with the larger amount.

And I’m going to stick with homemade flour tortillas. They don’t take long to make and I discovered last night that they are worth every minute, no matter what they look like.

Let The Bagel Be Unbroken

Like everyone else I know I’m sitting at home, except for masked-and-gloved expeditions to the supermarket every couple of weeks. From the looks of things, everyone in the world has decided to take up baking when they are not washing their hands or going to the bathroom. Our markets have vast empty spaces where flour, paper towels and toilet paper used to sit.

I’ve been thinking if a guy wants to see immediate and sincere gratitude, the hot birthday present this spring could be a jumbo pack of toilet paper. But that’s neither here nor there.

I’m a meat guy and baking, like vegetables, has been off my beat. But we wanted bagels a couple of weeks ago, to replicate the deli experience we can’t have right now. I had some flour and yeast so I gave it a try. The bagels were OK, but far from ideal.

I wanted ideal.

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My first attempt. Using the finger-poke method to shape them, the tops turned out OK but the bottoms were wrinkled as a Shar-Pei’s face, and a lot less cute.

On my third effort I hit on a really good recipe at Sally’s Baking Addiction, here: https://sallysbakingaddiction.com/homemade-bagels/. I used her instruction for overnight proofing in the refrigerator, and they were delicious.

This is a great recipe and easy. I boiled the bagels for 90 seconds on each side, gave them their egg-white wash before baking and they came out perfectly chewy, with a slightly crisp crust. They taste just a little sweet like a perfect plain bagel should, and I think they taste better than any I can buy.

Shaping them, however, is killing me.

Bagel shapers seem be either pokers or snakers. Pokers make a ball out of each piece of dough then send a floured index finger through the middle and wiggle it until they have what they want. Snakers make a 10-inch-long rope of the dough, then fold it around their open hand and roll to seal.

My tops look fine when I poke the hole, but as I cannot get a perfectly shaped ball in the first place the bottom bakes up looking like a construction zone.

Snaking gives me good-looking circles before I boil them but once in the water they decide to turn into bagel croissants.

A croissant bagel is not what I'm after.

This is not what I want.

On this specimen from a couple of weeks ago, the ends came apart when I boiled it, and once the bagel is in the water there’s no going back. It tasted good, but I needed to do better.

Today I tried the method you can see here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zTdbDxfYydo.

The technique in this video has you tie a little knot at the end of your rope, then press to roll everything together. I can see that I didn’t go quite far enough with my knot, and maybe not vigorous enough with my roll to seal, so I had a little unwinding in the water.

Bagel snakes. Looks like the two in the back are attacking each other. Gotta tighten my knot.

Still, I am encouraged and having fun. The bagels taste great and I think I’m closing in on the shaping. I think I’ll have it right next time.

As it is, I’ve learned something fun, useful and delicious.

And that absolute perfection might be overrated.