OK, so this is another project that you don’t technically bake, but it’s main ingredients are flour, oil, and baking soda (and by main I mean those are literally half of the ingredients… the others being water and salt.) so I’m counting it. I have wanted to make homemade tortillas for a while now. We love Mexican food in our family (we love any food that lends itself to intense spice) so we knew this would go over well.

I won’t lie, this is a little more time intensive than I thought. I’m glad we attempted it on my husband’s day off! I looked at a few tortilla recipes and started with about 4 cups of flour and added about a tablespoon of salt and a teaspoon or so of baking powder then just added equal parts water and vegetable oil until I had a dough consistency I could work with. This is a milestone for me. Part of the reason I love baking and am freaked out by cooking is that I like exact measurements so being willing to eyeball something and adjust accordingly is a breakthrough.

After mixing together, you pull off pieces and roll them into balls that will become individual tortillas. We decided it was good to experiment with size because we weren’t sure what we wanted to do with the finished tortillas so I made a variety of sizes and then left them to sit for about an hour covered with a damp cloth (some recipes I saw had as little as 30 minutes but we went with an hour because other recipes suggested that and also because we started chasing after the toddler who was very antsy after driving so much for our vacation.)
After an hour I recruited my husband to help make a little assembly line. I rolled out each of the tortillas and he took the rolled tortillas and cooked them in the pan. I helped flip the tortillas if he had to chase after little guy throughout the process.

Also, you WILL get flour all over your outfit… but isn’t he adorable?!

A few things we learned:
*Don’t judge your tortillas by the first one out of the pan. they get better!
*Rolling the dough as THIN AS POSSIBLE yielded us our favorite kind of tortillas
*Don’t decide to do a project that involves standing over a hot stove for an hour during August in Phoenix- rookie mistake.
*Placing the tortillas in a plastic bag will allow their own heat and steam to keep them soft
*Homemade tortillas are VERY different than store-bought- much more delicious but also more filling. We made quesadillas for dinner and we were so much more full than we would normally be.

So this project was a little more time consuming and labor intensive than I thought. The taste made it worth it but I don’t think we will be replacing our tortilla purchases for homemade the way we’ve replaced our french/artisan bread purchases with homemade. I would definitely make these for a special occasion or a margarita night or possibly just make a huge batch and freeze them once the weather gets tolerable!

As a follow up to my last post, here’s a screenshot of my random.org draw. (I didn’t count my own comments or double comments which gave us a total of 12 entries)

Congrats to my second commenter, Morgan! I will be reaching out to you to get you your planner! And congrats also to Commenter 10, Rachel, you were the second in the sequence and I was so excited to hear about everyone’s stories I’d like to send you some fun stickers to help brighten up whatever planner you are using now! (Or just to help you brighten someone else’s day!)

I am hoping to do some more giveaways after the next two months of crazy busy freelancing are over. So keep a look out for more opportunities to spread the joy as we head into the holiday season!