We eat a lot of Tortillas. We make quesadillas all the time, as well as burritos and wraps.
We're also dirt poor, so I'm always looking for ways to save money on food, have better food, and store food for harder times.
So I usually look at the things we use the most. How I can make them myself, store them, and be more sustainable in general.
Flour tortillas are super easy to make. Not to mention, crazy cheap compared to buying them. Also, they are so good when you make them yourself that I don't think we will ever buy another tortilla at a store. There's just no comparison.
The only drawback is that they do take some time. This batch of 64 took me 2 hours.
For most batter and dough you want to mix your dry ingredients first.
This allows them to get mixed evenly. If you don't mix them first, you can get pockets of single ingredients that didn't mix into the dough/batter correctly. They mix in much easier when it's all dry together.
After the dry ingredients are mixed you can add the oil and water.
Here we make this recipe in 4x batches. So I use a large pan to mix it all in.
I wash up and use my hands to mix it all together. Utensils get hard to manage when you're making this much.
Once all ingredients have mixed in let it set for about 5 minutes then form it into a ball.
Since we make a 4x batch we cut the ball into quarters.
Each of these quarters will make 16, 8 inch tortillas, or 12, 10 inch tortillas. We make both sizes for different things.
With this much dough, I work on one quarter at a time and leave the other quarters in the pan until I can get to them.
With each of the quarters I form a ball again, then depending the size were making I cut that ball accordingly.
Half of this whole batch will be 8 inch and half will be 10 inch.
For the 8 inch I cut this ball into quarters.
Then cut each of those into quarters to make 16 total pieces.
I get my surface ready with a bowl of flour on hand. You need this to be adding flour to the surface you roll on, as they start to stick.
Each one of these pieces I'll form into a ball.
Begin to press the ball flat with the palm of my hand.
Then use a rolling pin to roll that ball out into something that at least resembles a circle in a dr suess book.
Before rolling I'll heat the pan up on medium heat. Once it's fully hot just throw what you just rolled into the dry pan.
You'll start to see bubbles within several seconds.
You don't really want them to grow more than this:
Before you flip it.
If you go to much longer they will get crispy and not fold when you want them to. This is really a light cook.
That's it, a homemade flour tortilla.
As shown in the picture, be sure they are perfectly round lol
Anyway, repeat that process over and over, until you've used up all of the dough you made and have a nice stack of tortillas.
The little black is from the flour burning. I generally don't care about it but you can brush the flour off of them before heating them.
Put them in a bag and into the fridge.
The 8 inch fit nicely in gallon freezer bags. The 10 inch have to be folded to fit.
As I said before, we're dirt poor. So we make large batches then store them for later.
Our preferred method for storing them is freezing.
They freeze great and there's is no difference at all between eating frozen ones that you've thawed out and fresh ones. They don't change a bit.
To freeze them though you do have to bag them differently. They can stick if you let them touch in the bag then freeze them. Sometimes you'll get them apart, sometimes you won't.
So we use parchment paper between the layers so they don't stick.
Then into the freezer they go. Our freezer is quite small but we use it like crazy.
Now we can enjoy them whenever we want without a trip to the store or making more.
Just thaw them in the fridge a day or two before you want them.
We save a ton of money making these ourselves and frankly, they taste way better.
To buy 8 inch tortillas at the store we will pay between $3-4 for a pack of 10. That's $.3-.4 usd each!
This batch we make, of 64 8 inch (this time it was 32 8" and 24 10"), costs us a grand total of $1.50 to make. That's $.023 per tortilla. That's between 13x and 17x savings!
Knowing that I'm only paying 2.3 cents to make these let's us be more liberal in using them. They add so little to a meal this way. The 50-cent meal series I did explains the cost of using store bought tortillas. Without it I was at 30 cents per meal and adding it went up to about 70.
I know, 70 cents a meal is stupid cheap but when you have nothing, even that 40 cents is a lot. So now we can say with confidence that the 50 cent meal is really about 33 cents if you're having something in a wrap.
Thanks for reading.
Homemade Flour Tortillas
by Michael David
Co-founder of #thealliance and loyal since before the egg.
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