Rolling out the tortilla dough, trying to make a nice thin tortilla
Mexican food in the US reliably features a few things. There are invariably brimming baskets of tortilla chips, bowls of red salsa, and stacks of flour tortillas.
All of these things were plentiful in Baja. As we’ve moved south in Mexico, though, we’ve been surprised that these staples (or so we thought) of Mexican cuisine are hard to find. Some stores will have a bag or two of tortilla chips (called totopos here), and most stores have 5-10 kinds of hot sauces. But salsas are generally made at home from fresh ingredients.
A few of the ingredients for fresh salsa verde
It turns out that flour tortillas are uncommon outside of northern Mexico. Further to the south almost every town of any size has a local tortilleria, but these only turn out corn tortillas.
So, we’ve had to take matters into our own hands. All of the ingredients for fresh salsas are available at every small store, so it’s straightforward to either dice or blend chiles, tomatillos, cilantro and sometimes garlic, onion, and salt. The result is a bowl of delicious salsa, either red or green.
Oil roasting guajillo peppers for salsa
Flour tortillas are easy to make in theory. Once the dough is mixed up, a small ball is rolled out as thin as possible. The flattened dough is dropped into a dry skillet for 10-20 seconds per side, and the result is a flour tortilla with perfect char marks. In practice, it’s hard to get the dough rolled out enough to make a proper thin tortilla, but the results are always delicious.
Madrone-made flour tortillas
After some serious cravings for tortilla chips and watching them being made in a local taqueria, Angie took a shot at making them onboard Madrone. A surprisingly small amount of oil in a skillet and a stack of fresh corn tortillas, cut into quarters, yields warm chips that are way, way better than anything that comes from a bag.
Enjoying some delicious red salsa
