Corn tortillas

In the past I've been a (wheat) flour tortilla kind of girl. At a Mexican restaurant, I would never order corn tortillas (except in fried form, of course). Flour tortillas were also better at home, too. Corn tortillas were dry and coarse, while flour tortillas were light and fluffy and delicious. This was perhaps influenced by my dad's house's preference for white bread and the like, but even as recently as last year, I still preferred wheat to corn tortillas, though I would now go for a whole wheat tortilla and scoff at a white one.

The only use I had for corn tortillas was enchiladas, where they performed much
better than wheat tortillas. Corn tortillas don't absorb water like wheat tortillas and thus don't turn into a sticky wet-bread mess in the middle of your tasty enchiladas. This, in fact, was the inspiration for my new-found change of heart. I was making enchiladas for the husband's birthday (a week before the party, partly as a test run and partly because I like to indulge any specific food requests he makes), and wanted to try making my own tortillas for it, at least one time. It was then that I found out - Corn tortillas can be awesome!

I bought a bag of corn tortilla mix at the store, which contains corn meal and lime. You add salt and water (don't forget the salt, or else blech!), according to the bag instructions. You divide the resulting dough into an appropriate number of pieces (2 c flour = 16 tortillas), and roll the pieces into little balls. Then you take each ball and shape it into a tortilla.

The easy way is to use a tortilla press. Lacking this, as I did, you can use a rolling pin, but it's a little tricky to figure out how to roll it into something approximately round and not full of cracks. My first roll-outs looked like Gondwanaland. The next phase resembled Australia, which seemed like an improvement at the time. Eventually, 32 tortillas later, they got a little more uniform. An important factor in the whole process - the pre-tortilla sticks to EVERYTHING except heavy plastic. Like ziploc bag thickness plastic. Finally, a use for all those ziploc bags we save! Also, do not make more tortillas than you can lay out onto pieces of plastic, because they stick to things or to each other, and will not let go without some disintegration, and then it's back to the pin for reshaping!

Regardless of the shape, though, the cooking process is simple. Use whatever pan you use for pancakes, and cook the tortilla about a minute on each side, or until it browns a bit. They don't take long to cook, and as the first side cooks, the whole thing will curl up a little bit. It might be necessary to use a spatula to mash them down in the middle once you flip them, so they get a bit flatter.

Serve with butter, or make into your favorite dish. You could probably even fry them into chips or tostada shells, if you were so inclined and didn't have a hatred of frying like I do.

Once cooked, they supposedly can keep for a week if wrapped up in the refrigerator.