Adding Lard for Homemade Flour Tortillas

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. So once you feel as though that most of your lumps have been worked out, I'm actually feeling pretty good about this mixture right now, you can dump your other remaining fat right in here. Now, you may ask yourself, why didn't I just dump them both in at the same time? Because that's just too much at once and it's just too hard to work with. It just makes things so much harder on you if you do it that way. So I'll just cover this one with flour. It's easier if you get this nice and covered in flour before you start cutting into it. Because what happens then is as soon as you actually break into the surface like this, you'll see that the flour just covers it and it keeps it really from sticking to your fork. Now what's going to happen here is this the point at which I just say to heck with it and I am going to abandon my fork completely. Because I will show you the way that I was shown how to make these. Just take your ring off. Just take your nice clean hands which I've got here and you just basically grab a hold of that piece of lard and just give it a squeeze. Working in your fingers and what happens is as you squeeze it, not only are you warming it up, but as you squeeze it, it's being, you know, it's coming out of your fingertips, it's coming out of the palm of your hand and it's basically turning it into ribbons. Which makes it easier for you to mix it together with the flour. And what's going to happen here is, you're going to get a pretty rough, shaggy mixture and it's not going to be the end tortilla dough just yet. You've got a ways to that, because you have to add the hot water. The reason you use hot water is the actual water itself will start to help break down some of the shortening, butter, fat, lard, whatever you use. So I'm going to do this for a couple of minutes, make sure it looks nice and smooth and we'll come back and we'll ad in our water."