I recently posted about my attempt at making authentic homemade tortillas.  As you may recall the results were less than pleasing - the tortillas were very crisp and essentially flavorless.  Thanks to some help from Meghan on the Project Foodie forum I have tried again.  The results — well you be the judge.

To recap, the goal was to make homemade tortillas that tasted like the ones I had eaten at Mexican restaurants when I lived in Houston TX.  The original recipe I attempted was from Fine Cooking, (June/July 2006 p. 73) and claimed to be for easy tortillas.  On the Project Foodie forum, Meghan listed off several potential problems with what I did the first time: choice of fatty substance, too much water, resting time, and how they were cooked.  The problems in my particular case appear to have been excess water and the (attempted) use of a food processor rather than hand kneading.  The use of vegetable shortening rather than lard was another potential issue that may have caused some loss in flavor.

This time I used a different recipe that purported to be authentic.  The pre-amble to the recipe states that the use of lard vs. vegetable shortening is an on-going topic of dispute.  As I generally try to make healthy eating choices I decided to continue with the vegetable shortening rather than the lard.  Conceptually making tortillas is easy: mix flour, shortening and water; kneed the dough; let the dough rest; shape the dough and then cook the tortillas.  Easy that is until you read the fine print which includes 10 - 15 minutes of kneading!  That's a lot of kneading so I now understand why the initial recipe attempted to use the food processor.  I have weak wrists so I didn't last 15 minutes but with Husband’s help we got nice elastic dough.  The recipe said to rest 1/2 hour but Meghan had said longer is ok and since I was busy preparing the filling for the Fajitas I ultimately let the dough rest a bit over an hour.  Shaping the tortillas was also demanding because each tortilla should be rolled as thin as you can get them.  So rolling was a good arm work-out.  The recipe made 12 tortillas so I rolled a couple, cooked a couple and then rolled more (again with Husband’s help on the rolling…).  The cooking is the easiest part taking only 15 - 30 seconds per side.

The result?  Well the tortillas didn't look the prettiest due to our lack of expertise in rolling nice round tortillas but they did have the soft texture the initial batch lacked.  But the taste, unfortunately, was not much improved from the original batch.  While I think they had a bit more flavor than the original crunchy tortillas, in general they tasted like flour and water.  Perhaps it was the use of vegetable shortening rather than lard. Or perhaps I'm just not meant to be a tortilla maker.  Given the amount of effort the whole process took I'm just not convinced it was worth the effort.  In fact, I'm not sure it would be worth the effort even given a tasty result.  I'm a bit saddened that I won't have homemade tortillas but I'm definitely looking forward to them the next time I go out to a Mexican restaurant that makes their own...