Soft wheat flour tortillas

Healthy, tasty Mexican tortillas

This is a simple, perhaps the simplest recipe you could ever come across, for making soft and tasty flour tortillas at home. What’s more, this is a healthier recipe, for instead of using just all-purpose flour or maida, we’ll make them with a mix of all-purpose flour and whole wheat flour.

Traditional Mexican tortilla recipes include lard or animal fat. Nowadays, this is often replaced with butter or oil. In this recipe, we’ll use butter. As you’ll see in the video, preparing the dough by hand takes barely five minutes. Yes, the rolling out needs practice. But that’s not something that cannot be learnt. And believe me, once you taste these home-made wheat flour tortillas, you won’t want to look at store-bought ones again.

Ingredients

1 cup all-purpose flour (maida)

½ cup whole wheat flour (atta)

(Some more for dusting, rolling)

2 tbsp butter

½ tsp salt

Almost ½ cup hot water

Makes 6 tortillas

Procedure

1. Add the salt and butter to the flour. Mix the butter into the flour till it appears like bread crumbs.
2. Add the hot water (hot, but not boiling hot water) to the flour mix, a little at a time, till you get a soft and smooth dough that’s only very slightly sticky. Cover it and rest it for 20-25 mins.
3. If the dough now seems too sticky, add around 1 tsp of whole wheat flour to it and knead it lightly for a few seconds.
4. Divide the dough into six portions and shape each one into a ball.
5. Lightly dust a rolling board with flour and roll out the dough balls, one by one, applying light and even pressure as you roll them, into thin discs around 7.5 – 8″ in diameter. Flip each tortilla once or twice while rolling it out. Arrange the rolled-out tortillas on a flour-dusted tray, overlapping them a little.
6. Cook each tortilla on medium high heat on a preheated griddle. Flip it the first time when small bubbles appear all over it. These should form within 15 to 20 seconds. Cook the tortilla for another 20 seconds or so till bigger air pockets begin to form. Flip it one more time, and the air pockets will begin to merge and form bigger ones. Press the tortilla down lightly with a spatula to help it puff up. Sometimes all the air pockets could merge and cause the tortilla to puff up completely. Flip the tortilla one more time and after a few seconds, transfer it to a plate.
7. Transfer the tortillas to a paper towel-lined container or sealable plastic bag.

The tortillas can be stored in the fridge for around two weeks or so, and then when you reheat them for a few seconds they’ll be as good as when you made them.

Enjoy!