I’m going to chalk it all up to a bizarre rampage of discovering who I am.. but today I made tortillas. This is after an attempt to make re-fried beans, chocolate chip cookies/scones, & strawberry short cake.

I suppose it’s really due to me setting challenges and markers for myself then accomplishing them one by one. A way to measure progress perhaps. Today’s challenge was simple– make a few tortillas that I could eat with dinner tonight.

Like most cooking challenges I first went to the net. Finding 4 or 5 of the same recipes and comparing them. Up front– a lot of them called for some type of lard or shortening… Something which I neither like or want to attempt finding. The substitute was vegetable oil- or (perhaps) what I’ve been tricking myself to believe is vegetable oil :).

So to start out I needed flour… the recipe I finally followed called for 3 ½ cups of all-purpose flour.. I have “fu-ra-wa” + the flour kanji and some others… but I couldn’t tell you whether or not it was “all purpose flour.” All I knew was it wasn’t bread flour which would be PAN-Furawa..

Next I needed to add 1 teaspoon of salt & ½ teaspoon of baking powder. I recently discovered that baking power is a ‘raising’ material. That is– it makes stuff rise. Too much and you could get an Indian NAN– to little and you’d get a stiff paper tortilla. All this I learned from making cookies which turned into scones due to adding a 1/2 teaspoon  baking power more then what was probably needed.

After baking powder came 3.5 oz of vegetable shortening.. Again like I thought– I’m not a fan and believed veggie oil *would* work fine.. And I was mostly right.. however, after having completed this recipe I can see why shortening is called for. It adds a more ‘chewy’ texture, rather then a “crispy” one that the oil presumably adds.

Next was 1 cup of plain Jane– good ole fashion warm water. The idea here wasn’t to dump, but to drizzle & mix. As you drizzle and mix you’re supposed to hand-mix it around.

Now “MY” experience was that once I touched this stuff it went straight from the bowl to my hands like two attracting magnets– gobbling up my hand in a white goop. Eventually it settled down– but not before I had to put the beast down with more and more water– of course that’s when it went too gooey and I had to counter with more flour.

At the end of this madness actually sat a good looking ball of dough. It tasted bland, but that was to be expected. Some ‘wild out there’ recipes said one can add chopped chili peppers or taco seasoning or something wild into the mix… I, however, passed (this time).

At this point the first half was over. Next half was the “plop, roll, and fry.” According to multiple sources I also had a 20 minute intermission. This was to let the dough settle, the heck, down– This time was something that I could use to say clean or wash or something except I didn’t. Instead I spent my “half time” going to the farthest 100 yen store in Mutsu to find a puny 100 yen rolling pin & a wine bottle opener. 210 yen total with tax.

Upon returning I found my blob had changed slightly to a more golden color. My next job was to cut it up and roll it into small tortilla balls.

So I began ripping and tearing the dough into 9 little dough balls.

Now with a pan, a pin, and some enthusiasm I began rolling those balls into the closest flat circle I could muster in 1-2 minutes as the pan began to heat up…

I would then throw that raw ‘tort’ on the pan then quickly return to start another–

stopping of course every 15 seconds..

to flip the last tortilla over..until it had brown marks..

Finished tortillas went on to a plate covered with a towel.

The whole ordeal probably didn’t take longer then 15-20 minutes, but the feeling was like being Ana Garcia (a famous Mexican chef) whipping up a fiesta in my small Japanese apartment. Suffice to say, it was intoxicating.

At the end sat a short stack of tortillas bursting with the fumes of what I’d imagine would be a lazy Saturday afternoon in the barrio wafted all around the kitchen. I felt exhausted, but very satisfied.. To test my success(es) I loaded one tortilla from the bottom of the stack with a grip of cheese and nuked it in the microwave for 2 minutes on high… I pulled out the steaming sizzling cheesy treat and plopped myself on the couch. Nothing tasted so good as that did at that very minute…

It was another victory story– more proof I *can* survive in Japan after all.

~J

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