Recipe: Corn Tortillas

(Yes, there is some pressure cooking in here too).

Corn Tortillas

An extra for this week purely because it completes yesterday’s birria post….

This is not a pressure cooker recipe, obviously, but pressure cooking is going to come into it….and as a good amount of food (beans! carnitas!) cooked in the pressure cooker ends up being served with tortillas in some form or another and because people asked, here is my recipe for tortillas. I have written recipes for tortillas in various cook books (Leaf and Citrus), but not in such a long form.

(As an aside I’m still working on a pressure cooker version of the tortilla lasagne, much better suited to pressure cooking than the Italian sort simply because tortillas are round and lasagne sheets are rectangular. There are lasagne recipes out there but they involve breaking up and overlapping sheets of lasagne which I do not think is ideal as it makes for a dense, unevenly cooked lasagne. Perhaps I should try with fresh which can be more easily cut to size? I do sometimes toy with the idea of making round sheets of pasta but I am not sure anyone else is going to think it is worth the effort. I wonder if anyone will every make a domestic pressure cooker that is square/rectangular? Sorry, long train of consciousness there.)

Back to tortillas and firstly a word on the ingredients. You can make flour or flour/corn tortillas but I am concentrating on corn here as this is what I make most often. To make decent corn tortillas you need masa harina, a ground nixtamalized corn/maize. Corn kernels are dried, soaked in calcium hydroxide (slaked lime). This removes a lot of the bran and improves the flavour, the nutritional benefits as well (eg, means niacin can be better absorbed) as making it much easier to grind. When still rehydrated, it is put through a grinder to make a dough. It is used fresh to make tortillas and tamales etc. etc. OR dehydrated again to make the masa harina/flour we can buy.

The nixtamalizing process is what sets it apart from maize flour/polenta. You can, at a pinch, make tortillas with fine polenta but you will need more polenta to water (compared to more water to masa) the dough is slightly harder to work with and it tastes like polenta, not masa, so not ideal. Maybe if you were going for a highly seasoned/flavoured tortilla you could get away with it.

Masa harina is easy to get hold of in the UK though. Loads of places around London, obviously, health food chains like Wholefoods and Planet Organic. Ocado have it, so do online specialist shops such as Sous Chef and The Cool Chile Co. I prefer the flavour of blue to white/yellow, but this is personal preference.

The recipe:

To make 16 tortillas (and I frequently double or triple this when I have a willing extra pair of hands in the form of my son, or want an excuse to spend some time listening to my audio book in the kitchen) you need:

250g masa harina

330g freshly boiled water

½ tsp salt (optional)

The salt is optional as a lot of authentic recipes don’t add salt. I do as I prefer the flavour, but don’t feel you have to.

Put the masa harina in a bowl and pour over the water. Sprinkle in the salt if adding. Using a wooden spoon or a fork, mash the grain and water together until it forms a dough. It will be too hot to mix by hand to start with but you will need to at some stage to bring it together into one large piece of dough. Be careful and wait until you can bear to do so, you don’t want to burn yourself.

When the dough comes together, the texture is similar to that of play dough. Soft, pliable, not sticky. If it feels at all dry or floury, add a little more water because you don’t want tortillas cracking before you’ve even got them onto your griddle. I find the best way to do this is to wet my hands and squish the ball of dough a bit, repeating until I’m happy with the consistency.

For total accuracy and evenly sized tortillas,  I weigh the dough and divide by 16. This should get you dough balls of at least 36g – somewhere between a walnut and a golf ball. You can measure your first ball and do the rest by eye, or measure them all. (I measure them all, much to the disgusted impatience of my son who is neither perfectionist or a control freak.)

Take each piece of dough and again, if it is feeling dry, wet your hands very slightly. It is time to start pressing. You have three options – a tortilla press, flattening with a heavy based skillet or casserole, or a rolling pin. I have also seen people use pasta rollers, but I haven’t tried this, so I can’t comment. Whatever method you do use, including if you are using a rolling pin, you need to put the dough between a couple of sheets of plastic wrap or – and this is my preference as I try to avoid plastic in my kitchen – baking parchment.

There is no doubt the fastest and most effective way is with a press. I can never get them quite as thin with a skillet, and while I can with a rolling pin, it takes much longer and it is harder to get them perfectly round. To press evenly, place a piece of parchment on the press, add your dough ball, making sure it is perfectly centred then place the other piece of wrap on top. Flatten lightly with your hand, then close the press, flip the hinged handle over and press down until it touches the press. Open and if you think it is still too thick (anything over 1mm), make one turn and press again. I often double press mine. You should end up with tortillas which are between 12-13cm in diameter. If using a skillet, again, make sure you press down directly over the dough so it flattens evenly - you don’t want tapered/thinning edges.

While you are pressing your tortillas, heat a pan to cook them on. Again, you have options. I have a cast iron double plancha/griddle which spans 2 rings of my hob. I heat to a medium – not too hot or they will burn before they are cooked through. I use the flat side and don’t add any oil/fat, just grill them dry. You can also use a skillet, frying pan or tava. If your only option is a non stick pan, you will need to rub oil or fat over it simply because you aren’t supposed to dry fry in a non stick pan. If you are using cast/spun iron (the ideal), and find your tortillas are sticking, it is usually because you are trying to flip them before they are ready to do so. If you have reached the point of desperate measures, use a rag (I use an old piece of cut up tea towel) or kitchen towel to rub fat (lard out of preference) or oil over so you get a very thin layer, just enough to bring a sheen to the surface.

So, press each tortilla, carefully peel off the parchment or cling film and place on the heated surface. Leave just long enough to make sure it isn’t sticking (no longer than 15-20 seconds), then flip. Cook for a minute, then flip again. It should start to puff up in moments – this means it is filling with steam. I sometimes help this along by pressing a palate knife firmly along one edge which always seems to help. But try to avoid this – you should really just wait for it to puff up. At this point, it is ready. Within seconds of you moving it from the heat, it will deflate. Keep warm, wrapped in a tea towel (or a cloth lined, lidded tortilla basket) while you cook the rest.

It is much, much better to form the balls, press and cook as you go and it is doable. I find I can form a ball and press it while another tortilla is cooking for that first minute. But I do often let my son press them all while I cook them. As long as the dough isn’t drying out, you should be OK. You can always moisten with wet hands and help keep dryness at bay by keeping the dough covered with a damp tea towel.

The end result should be tortillas which are lightly browned but still quite soft and pliable in the middle – you need to be able to fold them without cracking. They will have shrunk slightly during the cooking process and will be around 11cm in diameter. Keeping them together in a tea towel does help with this as it will trap both residual moisture/steam and heat.

You can eat immediately, store for a day or so, well wrapped, allow to go stale and cut up to make nachos, freeze, also well wrapped.

How to Reheat?

Aha! This is where your pressure cooker can come in handy!

There are loads of ways of reheating tortillas:

1. The oven. I would only do this if my oven was already on/cooling down. Wrap the tortillas in foil – no more than 4-6 together -  and heat for around 15 minutes at approximately 170-180C. You shouldn’t need to add any moisture, there should be enough residual in the tortillas to soften them up.

2. On the stove top. I do this if it is just a few. The tortillas will usually need dipping/brushing in water first if they are quite dry, then dry fry until hot but still pliable.

3. Pressure cook! Yes you can do this. Put a couple of centimetres of water in your pressure cooker. Add a trivet and a steamer basket. Wrap the tortillas in foil – I think 4 at a time is OK. Close the lid, bring up to high pressure, time for just 30 seconds and fast release. That is enough to get them piping hot.

You can also microwave but I have never done this as I don’t own a microwave so I am not going to regurgitate the Internet methods I have read.

This ended up being much longer than I intended so I hope it is all useful information, despite the paucity of pressure cooking! Next week, a look at pasta….