Handmade Flour Tortillas | Rick Bayless Taco Manual

foreign [Music] welcome back to my kitchen and the next page in our Taco manual is one of the most important because we've come to tortillas and this time flour tortillas might sound crazy coming from the guy that is such a huge proponent of corn tortillas but in the northern part of Mexico flour tortillas are a thing and when they're homemade they're ethereal so let's step through the very very simple method of making a good homemade flour tortilla first of all we're going to start with flour here this is an all-purpose flour the variety that I'm using has a little tiny bit of whole wheat mixed into it which I like the flavor of it comes from a local Mill the second ingredient that we're going to work with is the fat now you'll find recipes online and in cookbooks that call for oil not a proponent of that vegetable shortening it makes it kind of flaky tortilla still not a proponent of the flavor because what I learned when I was working in the northern part of Mexico doing all of my research was that the best ones are made with fresh rendered pork lard now that's not the stuff that you buy on the Shelf in the grocery store you have to get this from The Butchers section or go to a really good Butcher and ask for fresh rendered pork lard that's what we work with in our restaurant and so that's what I have here I'm going to scoop all of this in and this is a little bit like making pie dough though I'm not working with really cold fat I'm going to work this fat into the flour I mentioned this thing about the the little bit of bran or the whole wheat that's in this flour just so that when you see that it has a little bit of color to it you won't be sort of perplexed about that now once I've worked this in when you're making pie dough oftentimes people will say to the size of small peas this year working in a little bit more and we're not starting with a very cold fat here so it will work in very quickly okay so the next thing that we need to do is the liquid which in tortilla making flour tortilla making will be very hot tap water so I'm going to go to the sink and get this hot tap water three quarters of a cup of it here yep and I am going to measure in about three quarters of a teaspoon of salt now this is um this is up to your own taste I kind of like salty tortillas when it comes to flour tortillas so I'm going to put in almost a whole teaspoon of it there but three quarters of a teaspoon is a good amount and then I'm going to pour in a half a cup of this hot tap water leaving behind about a quarter of a cup of that I've got a fork here to start mixing it and you'll see that right away this the liquid is absorbed by the flower and then you'll notice that I'm just kind of mushing it up against the side to try to incorporate as much of the flower into the dampened dough as possible there okay that's about as much I think as I can get in there but I still don't have all of the flour Incorporated so around the outside of this bowl where the unincorporated flower is I'm going to pour I know it's going to take about all the rest of that so now using my hands to mix this nicely together if you're working with really good fresh rendered pork fat like I am smell is so great it smells like you're making flour tortillas with a little bit of the flavor of roasted pork in it that's the one thing I like about Mexican pork lard is that it is done over high heat not low heat so the idea is to get a lot of that really delicious delicious roasties flavor into it okay so it is now basically all Incorporated you can see I've got just a little bit of it left down here in the bottom but I'm going to incorporate that just simply by putting it on top here and then work it like that okay so very simple though just incorporate everything pretend it's a little bit like bread dough at this point and just give it a few needs not too many but you want a smooth dough at this point and then you want to cut it into 12 pieces this is going to make a dozen tortillas so to make that go smoothly I'm going to roll it into a log a hood of even log here and then using a bench scraper cut it in half and then each half into half again and again and then let's cut these things into let's see we've got four or three pieces so like that and then each one of these needs to get rolled in balls if you've done much in terms of baking before you know that the easiest way to roll these into balls is to have them in the palm of your hand and roll like that cupping around it and it will make a perfect little ball like that when you watch people working in bakeries that's the way like in Mexico it's the Concha makers that use this technique all the time and when we get our 12 here then we just let them rest for about half an hour before we start rolling them out okay here are the rested bowls of dough I covered them with plastic wrap left them at room temperature and they're rolling out is pretty straightforward this is the kind of rolling pin that's typically used in Mexico I bought this in Northern Baja no excuse me Southern Baja where people make a lot of flour tortillas now you want to work on a floured board I will say that this kind of technique for lightly flowering the surface is the one that's used by all of the Bakers I like to actually kind of toss this guy in the flower a little bit just to get it started there flatten it out a little bit like that you don't want too much flour on your board because that flower will become incorporated into this flower tortilla and it'll actually make it taste flowery so stay away from that here we go rolling out I use the technique to roll away from me not back and forth and I turn about a quarter of a turn each time that I'm rolling the flour tortilla out this is a very malleable dough very easy to work with and when you get to about six inches which is the size for these flower tortillas you'll go to a griddle that you have already preheated so I've got this one over about what I would call a medium high fire so I'm going to pick this guy up and it's pretty evenly rolled I'm just detecting a tiny bit more thickness on one side there okay so now you pick this guy up and I'm going to put it on this preheated medium-high griddle and we'll just lay it down no fat or anything on the surface of this these will not stick this is kind of a what I'd call A Classic flat bread from any place in the world it's not as complicated as like the Indian Paratha which has many layers in it and it's very flaky but this is going to come out quite flaky too but it's because of the fat that we have in in it now you'll notice that all of a sudden it starts to Bubble when it starts to Bubble like that it's probably getting some Browning going on underneath so I'm going to flip it over see the little browned edges all around there and we're going to cook it for another like 30 seconds or so on the this side I usually just like in making corn tortillas I flip my flour tortilla another time you don't have to but I'm just sort of used to doing that but it gives a little bit more flakiness when you do that after this 30 seconds or so on the second side so um of course see how beautiful that is and it's puffing even more because I flipped it the second time the more puffiness that you get usually these won't go all the way to pita bread puff but the more puffiness that you see there the better the flakiness and the better your experience with the tortilla will be okay so I've got what I think is one of like the best flour tortillas in the world just really because it's flavored with that fresh rendered pork lard there and when I tear it open like this you can see just how incredibly flaky it is see all that flakiness there and you'll see some sort of darkish spots that is because it has a certain amount of fat in it that makes it really flavorful really tender you got to make these flour tortillas

Channel: Rick Bayless

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Id: vPFRTBlkb_M

Length: 10min 33sec (633 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 09 2023