April 2022: Tortillas
I didn’t grow up eating Mexican food. My mother never liked spicy-hot foot so we tended toward more European cuisines. I don’t think I ate much Mexican at all until freshman year of college when we regularly ended up at Taco Bell on late weekend nights. I apologize for calling anything at Taco Bell “Mexican.” I also apologize in advance to anyone who loves Taco Bell, but even drunk at 1 in the morning I remember it being bad tasting. Again, my apologies if you adore Taco Bell. I love McDonald’s food. I get it. Some bad things are just so so good.
Anyhoo, I didn’t eat much Mexican food growing up, didn’t care for it much as a young adult, and didn’t cook anything that could be called Mexican until I found a really great taco recipe in the Cafe Flora Cookbook. [Anyone who has ever lived in the Seattle area should be familiar with the vegetarian restaurant, Cafe Flora, and if not, you simply must go.] Cafe Flora’s Oaxaca taco recipe isn’t the easiest, but oh is it good. It involves making mashed potatoes and combining them with mozzarella and diced bell peppers and then pre-frying the tortillas to soften them up before rolling them into pretty cannoli-style folds to finish them in the oven. Yummy.
[More on Cafe Flora plus a link to the recipe. Recently voted one of Seattle’s best!]
Surprisingly, the hardest part of making these tacos was finding the corn tortillas. Flour tortillas? Easy. Corn tortillas I could never find. The only place where I had success was at the Market Basket on Somerville Ave, in Somerville, MA. Ok, easy and done, right? No. You do not understand. There is no store more popular on the planet than that Market Basket. Just to get a spot in the parking lot requires persistence and a bold struck of luck. Once you make it in, you’re entering a traffic jam of carts and people that would make a Los Angeles commute at rush hour seem like a Sunday morning. Shopping at that Market Basket is not for the feeble.
Thankfully, over the years corn tortillas have gotten much easier to find, but this year I had to make it hard again by choosing to make them from scratch. But guess what! They’re not hard at all. All you need is some Masa Harina and water. Masa Harina is kind of a treated corn flour made by soaking dried corn in calcium hydroxide and then grinding it into a dough. When the dough is dried, it turns into Masa Harina. [Some of you may be thinking I’m not truly making the corn tortillas from scratch because I’m not making the Masa Harina myself. Whatevs!]
Once you have Masa Harina, all you have to do is follow the instructions on the package. I sprung for the tortilla press to make it a little easier to press them (I like this one), but you could use any flat item to press them down. Then all you have to do is heat them up on both sides in a pan (~ 1 minute total) and it’s magic—you’ve got corn tortillas! These days I tend to make simpler tacos with black beans, onions, cilantro, cheese, and corn (see One Pan, Two Plates: More Than 70 Complete Weeknight Meals for Two for a great recipe), and it’s absolutely delicious.
Here’s what I’m not so good at: corn tortilla chips. I’ve tried baking them and frying them. I’ve tried them with dip and in soup. In my hands, they’re pretty close to terrible and a lot of work just to make a few of them. So I mostly do without.
My most recent cheat: I’m making guacamole for a family gathering (full disclosure: It’s Thanksgiving. Yes, I’ve put off writing this post from April cooking until November…). There is no way I’m making all the chips to go with it. SO I’ve asked my husband to bring the chips. Problem solved!