Home-made flour tortillas

One downside about moving to Australia is it is very hard to get Mexican food which MM and I love a lot. There is no where to find canned black beans and fresh tortillas are also a rare encounter in grocery stores. Back in the States tortillas used to be the staple food of our diet, though MM likes flour ones and I prefer tortillas made of corn.

I finally decided to bite the bullet and made my own from scratch. After some searching I realized corn tortillas are not possible without the special corn flour and some press machine. But luckily the flour type seems to be rather easy for this determined cook.

The recipe was from Homesick Texan's blog, which is the healthiest of all from what I read. I even used low-fat milk and that worked out ok.


Texas Flour Tortillas (adapted from The Border Cookbook by Cheryl Alters Jamison and Bill Jamison)
Ingredients:
Two cups of all-purpose flour (can make them whole wheat by substituting one cup of whole-wheat flour for white flour)
1 1/2 teaspoons of baking powder
1 teaspoon of salt
2 teaspoons of vegetable oil
3/4 cups of warm milk

Here is how it looks in the frying pan:



(Yes, yes, I know it is not nicely-rounded...)

Here is the final stack with eight of them!



(Yes, yes, I know they are not evenly-sized either).

A couple of tips:

1. Use medium-low heat otherwise the tortillas will puff a lot and that makes it is difficult for the other side to be cooked evenly.
2. it is cooked very fast really. I'd say three minutes is plenty of time but of course you have to flip them several times during that period.

Next time I think I will make more and safe some for the future. I'd cook even less time for those to-be-saved.

We ate tortillas with a bean stew and a salad--yummy!