Making Corn Tortillas
On Saturday night, I made my very own corn tortillas. This may not sound all that exciting to my friends and readers advanced in the culinary arts, but it was a big deal to me. The tortillas I made cannot be purchased in most stores in the United States. The corn tortillas you may purchase at a store in the U.S. is typically made by machines into perfectly round and very flat shells.
My tortillas are not quite as flat and definitely not perfectly round. But they bring me to a place I will never forget. Here are some pictures from my tortilla making experience along with some more details about what made these so special.
The tortillas started with MASECA – an corn flour made for tortillas and sold in stores that specialize in Latin American food. I picked up the floor on Thursday when I was in Norristown, PA doing other business. I was so excited when I discovered this little store which carried the flour necessary to make the tortillas.
While we were in Guatemala this summer, we ate a lot of handmade corn tortillas. Our first full day in Xenacoj, we actually had the opportunity to make our own tortillas. Try as we might, they never turned out as well as the ones made by the women of Xenacoj.
To make the tortillas, I combined 2 cups of corn flour, 1/4 teaspoon of salt, and just enough water to make the flour stick together. I mixed the dough for a couple of minutes until the mixture was combined.
Then I divided the dough into sixteen fairly equal parts. I’m an engineer, so you can imagine that I did my best to make sure these were as equally divided as possible. I rolled each part into a ball. The directions on the flour back indicated that I should use a tortilla press to flatten the tortillas. This would never work in the small villages of Guatemala. Whenever I saw the tortillas being made, it was always done by hand. The women would get a little water on their hands, and they would flatten the dough into perfectly round discs by passing the dough back and forth between their hands. It was amazing how perfectly they made these. After several attempts of my own, I was lucky to come up with anything looking remotely similar to a full moon. My tortillas were more irregular in shape.
Once I flattened out the dough ball, I put it on a hot skillet for a minute or two each side. In Guatemala, the women cooked these on a flat sheet over a fire. The skillet wasn’t quite the same, but it worked. It was at this point of the process I really started missing Susie, Linda, and Susie’s girls who made most of our tortillas throughout the week we were in Guatemala.
After watching me struggle with the first couple of tortillas, my family jumped in and tried their hands at making tortillas. We stood around the skillet talking about our experiences in Guatemala while we tortured the dough into some kind of submission. As you can see by the picture above, our tortillas weren’t perfect. It was okay though, we were remembering our experience and our Guatemala friends through this experience.
Finally, it was time to eat. We had rice, black beans, sautéed onions, and handmade corn tortillas. It doesn’t get any better than this. Well almost. It would have been much better if we were eating them in Guatemala with the Sgro family (the missionaries to Xenacoj), the Spooner family (the family from New York who joined us on the trip), the Espana family (the host family in Xenacoj), and you!
Since we came home from Guatemala in August, our family eats rice and beans at least once a week. It’s a great way to remember our experiences. It’s also a great opportunity to remember our friends in Xenacoj. This is how much of the world eats every day and every meal. We take this time to pray for those in Xenacoj, to pray for the Sgro family, the Spooner family, and the Espana family, and to pray for open hearts to serving those who need a little boost. It may just seem like rice, beans, and tortillas to you, but to our family this meal means so much more.
What did you have for dinner last night? What meals do you eat that remind you of something special? Have you ever made a corn tortilla?