Homemade Flour Tortilla Ingredient

Series Summary

A tortilla is a thin, unleavened flat bread, used in Mexico, Central America, the United States and Canada. The term "tortilla" was given by the Spanish invaders of the "New Land" for its resemblance to traditional round cakes that were popular in Spain. While traditional, authentic tortillas are made from maize or corn, many varieties are made today, using flour, wheat and spinach.

In this series of free cooking videos you'll learn how to make your own homemade flour tortillas. Expert Brandon Sarkis will show you the recipe step-by-step. You'll learn what ingredients and supplies you'll need to get started. He'll show you how to sift together the dry ingredients, how to add shortening and lard, and how to roll out the classic tortilla shape. Finally, you'll learn how to cook flour tortillas to perfection.

Video Transcript

"Hi. My name is Brandon Sarkis on behalf of Expert Village. Today I'm going to show you how to make flour tortillas that taste so good, you'll never buy the ones at the grocery store ever again. Okay, for our flour tortilla recipe today we're not going to need a great deal of ingredients here. There's only what? I guess five or six things here. So there's not a whole lot that goes in flour tortillas. It's just a matter of how you do it. So the first thing I've got right here. This is three cups of all purpose flour. This is just the plain old regular white flour. You get it at the grocery store. Nothing special about it. No kind of weird baking flour or special tortilla flour necessary. Now you will find a couple of flours that are designed for use with tortillas, but I'm going to show you the way to make this with just the regular everyday stuff as opposed to using specialty products. I've also got some baking powder. This is two, pardon me, two teaspoons of baking powder here. Just plain old regular baking powder. Not baking soda. That's completely different stuff. Also got some salt. One teaspoon of that. This is sea salt, but you can use whatever kind you want, so. This is just nice sea salt, a little coarser than regular salt you're going to find. I've also got two different kinds of fat here. We're splitting it half and half. So you can decide how you want to do it. You can go all shortening or all lard. I'm going half and half. I've got about three, three and a half ounces of shortening here. This is just vegetable shortening. And this is about three and a half ounces of just pure lard. So in all honesty, these are the two things that give you the flavor of the tortillas that you love so much. But I've even seen some people mix it like half lard, half butter. That works too. Or a combination of all three. It's really just a matter of what you prefer. I'm going half and half though with my shortening and my lard. The end result though is you need to use between four and six ounces of some sort of fat. Be it butter or shortening or lard. So that being said. And also you're going to need about a cup to a cup and a half of hot water. To get the whole dough to kind of stick together a little bit better. So now we'll see what we'll need to make them and we'll get started making them."