Homemade tortillas are a game changer

Last week, Brian was making some fish tacos. This is a dish we make fairly often: pan-fried nuggets of fish with salt and chili powder, served in either corn or flour tortillas with a cabbage-and-tomato slaw. Only this time, we were all out of both kinds of tortilla, and since our local supermarket has closed, we couldn't just make a quick run to the store to pick up some more. So Brian decided to make his own, using a simple recipe he found online. In a nutshell, you make a dough from flour, salt, baking soda, water, and oil and knead it for just a couple of minutes. Then you break off little balls of dough, roll each one out with a rolling pin, and cook them in a hot, ungreased pan.

These do not come out looking like store-bought flour tortillas. They're smaller, thicker, and not nearly as symmetrical. And, more importantly, they do not taste like store-bought flour tortillas, which don't really taste like much of anything, good or bad. In most recipes, they just blend into the background, like a canvas on which anything from black beans and spinach to sauteed shrimp and peppers can be the paint. They're more of a packaging material for other, more flavorful foods than a food in their own right.

These tortillas were nothing like that. They had all the flavor of fresh-baked bread, with a satisfying chew that gave my teeth far more to work on than a flimsy commercial tortilla. They weren't simply a vessel for the more flavorful fish and slaw; they were an integral part of the experience. I found myself flashing back with newfound appreciation to a story I'd read as a kid in which a little Mexican girl and her abuelita eat fresh tortillas with butter and jam. At the time, picturing the kind of flat, neutral tortillas I was used to, I didn't see the appeal of this dish, but now I got it.

The homemade tortillas are cheaper, too. The ingredients for this half batch—a cup and a half of flour, a half-teaspoon each of salt and baking powder, and a sixth of a cup of canola oil—cost less than 30 cents for eight tortillas. That's less than 4 cents a tortilla, as compared to about 10 cents off the shelf. And we can be sure they contain no palm oil.

Up until now, I'd always thought of tortillas as something that couldn't possibly be worth the effort of making from scratch. Even Jennifer Reese, author of Make the Bread, Buy the Butter—an analysis of which foods are and aren't worth making from scratch—admits that "Even though they taste inferior and cost more, packaged tortillas are so convenient I can't give them up." But after tasting just how good the homemade ones are, I don't know if I could ever go back to store-bought. Maybe if I were really in a hurry, I'd settle for the packaged kind. But it would definitely feel like settling.