Category: Classics & Standards

“Hey guys; you’ve written a couple times that we can find homemade tortilla recipes right here on your blog; I’ve looked and can’t find any – Where are they at?”

Ummm, well this is embarrassing… that’s a really good question; I coulda sworn they were here somewhere… Alright, I admit defeat, so here they are!

Unless you live near a source of fresh tortillas made daily, you owe it to yourself to build your own. The difference between store bought and fresh is night and day.

Ingredients are super simple and so is the process, although it certainly takes a good few reps to be able to turn out tortillas that look as good as what you buy; (Monica is our go-to roller for that very reason). As with all things cooking, the quality of what you use profoundly affects the finished product, so chose carefully.

Equipment needs are minimal; you can get by with just a rolling pin and a nice heavy frying pan. If you make corn tortillas with any frequency, you’ll want to consider buying a press. They come in really handy, are fun to use and a very cool tool to boot. Flour tortillas must be rolled, not pressed, so a good pin helps immensely; the thin, wooden kind that tapers towards the ends is best as far as we’re concerned. Finally, a comal, the traditional, sideless cast iron cooking surface will do a great job; they’re cheap and easy to find.
Here are our favorite recipes and methods.

Flour Tortillas
3 Cups unbleached, white flour
4 Ounces Unsalted Butter
1 Teaspoon Sea Salt
1/2 Teaspoon Baking Powder
1 Cup Hot Water

You can substitute either lard or canola oil for the butter if you prefer; each will impart a subtle taste difference, so try them all and pick your fave.

In a mixing bowl, combine the flour, salt and baking powder thoroughly.

Melt the butter and add to the dry mix. Use your fingers to massage the butter into the mix until thoroughly incorporated.

Add water and mix by hand until the dough forms a ball.

Cover the dough with plastic wrap and allow to rest for at least a half hour; you can refrigerate the dough for up to a day if need be.

Divide the dough and roll it into 12 equal balls. On a lightly floured surface, roll each ball out until it forms a nice circle roughly 6″ to 8″ across, depedning on how thick you like your tortillas.

In your pan or comal over medium high heat, cook the tortillas until you see that nice brown blistering form on each side. Stack your finished wrapped tortillas in aluminum foil to keep them warm.

Corn Tortillas
2 Cups Masa Harina
1.25 to 1.50 Cups hot Water

In a mixing bowl, combine the Masa and water by hand and blend until you get a nice, consistent dough that does not stick to your hands. You don’t want the dough too dry, either; shoot for a dough that holds together, isn’t sticky, but feels moist to the hand.

Roll the dough into 12 equal balls and allow to sit for about 10 minutes.

Whether you use a pin or a press, cut a gallon plastic storage bag into two equal sheets and place a ball of dough between them, then press or roll to roughly 6″ around.

Cooking process is exactly the same as for flour. Each side will get 30 to 60 seconds of cooking time.

Enjoy!

E & M

If We had to pick one thing that separates really good restaurant quality food from most home cooked stuff more than any other, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to vote for making good stock.

Now, that’s a process that scares some folks, and it shouldn’t. Making stock need not be super laborious or scary. We’ll show you a very effective, relatively quick and easy method.

So, first things first, what is stock, and especially, what is stock vis a vis broth? In simplest terms, stock comes from bones, while broth comes from meat. Think of stock as the root of superior soup, sauce, or maybe risotto. I’ve heard broth spoken of as seasoned stock, and that’s not far off the mark. That said, there is certainly an enhanced mouth feel and richness to stock, brought forth by the gelatin released from bones, that you just don’t get anywhere else. Certainly, what you make at home from great ingredients will always beat the pants off anything store bought and stock is no exception: When you want to pull out the stops and make a personal culinary statement, make it in house.

The first and most important step to take toward home stock production is to not throw out the bones, carcass, etc of your last wonderful roast, chicken, turkey, etc – Keep ’em and freeze ’em and set ’em aside for future use. If you get meat in volume as we do, You can ask for beef/veal/etc bones from your provider: If you hunted your own, save that stuff you might otherwise throw out and put it to good use; be it beef, chicken, grouse, pheasant, bambi, moose, buffalo, etc, they’ll all make fine stock, (And making stock is also a great opportunity to clean out the ol’ freezer).

In many restaurants, ‘Dark Chicken Stock’ has replaced veal stock as the go-to root of great soup, sauce, etc. If you’ve read that on a menu or seen it online, I bet you wondered what the heck they were talking about, right? The sole difference between light and dark chicken stock is whether or not the bones have been roasted; same goes for beef, veal, etc. Roasting yields a deeper, richer flavor profile.

So, let’s do some up and see where it takes us.

For this exercise, we chose beef, since down there in our freezer there were a couple of packets marked ‘soup bones’. Unwrapping those guys, I found a bunch of meat on some beautiful big hunks of bone, so I trimmed that off and set it aside for marinating; more on that in a sec. And FYI for your nice big stock pot full of finished product, you’ll want a couple pounds of bones to work with.

Preheat your oven to 325 F, and set dem bones in a baking pan. Now it’s mirepoix time, an essential component of great stock. You’ll want a mix of roughly 50% onion to 25% each of carrot and celery. You can whack all of that into nice big chunks, then toss everything into the baking pan with the bones. Give everybody a nice drizzle of extra virgin olive oil, and a bit of salt and pepper.

Toss the whole shebang into your preheated oven and let ’em get it on. Leave the mix in until you start to see light browning on the bones and veggies, about 1.5 to 2 hours.

While your bones are roasting, turn your attention to the meat. If your bones had generous flesh attached as ours did, use it; you don’t need any fancy cut, in fact, the cruder the better – Time and marination will make that stuff fork tender in the end run, believe me. We went for a simple marinade of:

2 cups red wine
2 Tablespoons olive oil
1 clove garlic, rough chopped
1 Sprig fresh rosemary
A shake and a grind of Sea Salt & Black Pepper

Place everything into a glass dish and refrigerate overnight.

Back to the bones and mirepoix. Fill a stock pot with a gallon of nice, clean water over high heat. Toss in everything from your baking pan. Add a couple of Bay leaves. Once the mix starts to boil, crank the heat down to a nice, slow simmer and let things take their course. You’ll lose some volume to evaporation, and that’s just fine. Leave the pot on over that low heat all day; at least 6 hours and up to 8 is just fine.

Remove your pot from the stove, cover and refrigerate overnight, (Or stick it out on the back porch if its cold out).

In the morning, you’ll find a nice, gooey layer of fat has formed on the top of your pot. Carefully ladle that off and discard. Now, using a sieve or a chinoise, remove all the chunky stuff from the liquid.

You should end up with something that looks about like this:

Now we’re gonna do some reasonable clarification. You’ll need that sieve or chinoise, plus a decent chunk of cheese cloth; if you don’t have any handy, most grocery stores sell it. If all you find is the very loose weave stuff that looks like badly spun spider web, no worries, it’ll work fine so long as you have a length of a few feet, which is what most packages contain. Take the cheese cloth and fold it into a nice, thick blanket and line your sieve with that. Carefully pour your rough stock through, then do it again and again; you want to get maybe 5 or 6 pours through your home-made filter, so go slow and let that cheese cloth absorb all the crusties. When you’re done, your stock will look like this

Maybe not textbook perfect, but when you take up a spoonful of that lovely stuff and it looks kinda like this, screw the textbook…

That, friends and neighbors, is beautiful stock.

You can stop right there and move on to making soup, or you can freeze the stuff for future use, or you can put it back on the stove and simmer some more, reducing it by roughly 50% and end up with some truly wonderful glace, that thick, flavorful, intense root for sauces, soups and all kinds of experiments. If you go the glace route, try freezing the results in an ice cube tray; then, when you need a little something to really kick up a sauce or soup or stew, you just pop out a cube or two and viola, instance intense flavor…

So there you have it, serious homemade goodness; you can do this with veggies, fish, chicken, turkey, pork, beef, whatever floats your boat – So, what kind are y’all gonna make first?