A New Kitchen Addition

 

Sometimes kitchen gadgets don’t really live up to the hype. In fact, I’d say that most of the time the new stuff is just gimmicky crap and soon is relegated to the outer reaches of kitchen storage (Do you hear that, pasta maker?). This isn’t true about my new tortilla press and I've made a permanent place for it in my kitchen, which is a very good thing because it’s cast iron and too damn heavy to move. I received it as a gift and it'll go down as one of the best presents I’ve ever received.

Having great corn tortillas now couldn’t be easier (unless I could actually buy them at a decent price). The tortillas that I can buy in packages don’t even taste like corn and seem to be mostly wheat flour and chemicals. The ones that I make with my new press are pure corn flour with a bit of salt and maybe some good, old-fashioned lard along with the water. You just have to mix the flour with the water and there's no long kneading process like when making bread. Then you make a small ball of dough and put it in the press between two sheets of plastic. I fry them in a few drops of oil and that’s it.

I've been tinkering with my dough recipe using a small percentage of wheat flour to make the tortillas more pliable but every one that I've made thus far has been wonderful and infinitely better than the store-bought trash I’ve been used to for too long. I have officially broken my dependence on foreign-born tortillas.

In an unrelated matter I made my variant on the Catalan dish Pa amb Tomàquet.