Even My Mother Thought It Was A Bad Idea

Mother: What are you doing this weekend?
Allycen: I was thinking I'd try making corn tortillas from scratch.
Mother: From scratch? Are you stupid? You know you can get them for three bucks a bag at the store, right?

*

She's right, of course: for three dollars, you can buy a bag of tortillas. But for four dollars, you can buy a bag of masa mix to make your own -- masa mix being ground up corn flour and some lime and nothing else.

And corn tortilla dough is the easiest dough in the world to make: just add water. Mix it together. Knead it together until, as the recipe on the back of the bag says, it has "play dough consistency."

(I follow instructions well.)

Then you separate the dough into about 16 even parts and roll them into little balls, like so.

My balls were uneven. (Mental note: do not say this out loud if there are more boys than girls in the vicinity.) I chose to find this charming. A chef -- a good one -- would strive for perfection and would no doubt have rows and rows of perfectly matching balls. But I am just a hobbyist, and as such, my mental illness has limitations.

At this point, you either break out your tortilla press or your rolling pin, set the dough ball of your choice between two pieces of wax paper, and turn it into a tortilla. You may note that this makes for some exceedingly dull photo ops.

I did this, still feeling smug about how easy this was, and then I realized that I couldn't peel the wax paper off of my tortilla. Or, well, I could, but not without completely destroying the tortilla. Which, for the record, was tiny. Miniscule. Not even remotely the size of the kind you buy for three bucks at Safeway. Not that it mattered at this point, since I couldn't get it to the pan to cook it anyway.

I scraped the dough from the paper and started over, adding one half of another ball and a little more masa to make it less sticky. My next attempt was not much better, but it only tore a little. I threw it in the pan; I was going to cook it, and then I was going to eat it, and if it wasn't completely terrific I was going to hurl the dough balls and the masa mix off of my balcony.

Look: it's misshapen. It looks less like a tortilla and more like a velociraptor. But it was delicious! Dusty and grainy and all sorts of other things that do not inspire salivation, but I loved it. So much better than the waxy things you get from a bag. I continued.

Totally thankless work. Josh's vote is, "Yeah. They're good." In the world's most bored tone of voice. Because "I made my own tortillas" is not sexy.

But they taste good. And maybe in a dozen years, they'll look okay, too.

*

And now for the 2009 Best Purchase Award: my apron. Because seriously, this could have been my shirt.