Mini tortillas from the Cool Chile Company

Mis amigos at the Cool Chile Company have introduced a new size of corn tortilla, 10 cm (a standard size is 15 cm), and they were nice enough to send me some to try.

I'm always stoked about Cool Chile tortillas; as my regular readers know, they are the only tortillas in the UK I endorse.

Small but effective!

When I saw these little beauties, I instantly thought of making mini tostadas ("tostaditas" if you will).



Tostadas (literally "toasted tortillas": essentially tortillas fried until crisp and then topped with any number of delicious things) are something I've overlooked in this blog, despite the fact that they a popular and very satisfying Mexican snack.

I guess I often focus on more complicated recipes. But this year, what with the new baby and all, I've been rediscovering some of the less daunting, more doable dishes.

And tostadas are definitively doable, especially as you can top them with just about anything.

I had a "test-drive" tostada for breakfast to check the frying time. As you may have gathered from my method of making homemade tortilla chips, I don't always go for frying, but that is the most typical way to make tostadas.

Whereas for enchiladas (or just to revive a tortilla that has gone stale) you want to fry the tortilla for about ten seconds on each side, tostadas need a full minute on one side and somewhat less than a minute in the other.

I topped this little guy with a fried egg and some Cholula. Simple but delicious.



The fried egg is the same size as the tortilla!

However, for the main event, I reverted to my baking method.

Partly this was to save time. Even a full-sized tostada is really just an antojito (snack), so I figured we'd all need several of these mini ones to make a proper lunch. Therefore it was quicker to do six at a time in the oven instead of one at a time in the pan.

To make these "tostaditas": Grease a baking tray with olive oil, lay out your tortillas, and brush with more olive oil (I use a pastry brush).

Look how many fit on one baking tray!

Bake at 200° C for ten minutes.

Now you're ready for the toppings.

But first a note: while the baking method has the advantage of letting you do several at once, they tend to curl up more than if you do one at a time in a frying pan - where you can use your spatula to keep them flat(ter).

But no tostada is completely flat, so it's not a big deal.

Now, to top these bad boys I made some frijoles colados (Yucatecan style "sieved" beans) by frying some homemade frijoles negros de olla ("black beans cooked in a pot") and blending them until smooth with a hand-blender.

(I promise I have a post on frijoles de olla coming soon!)

I also had a jar of pickled cactus paddles on hand, so I used some of that.

(The cactus was surprisingly spicy; I later found a couple chiles serranos in the jar! Awesome!)

And finally I made a homemade smoked chile and tomato salsa by charring three tomatoes and two cloves of garlic on a hot dry frying pan until they all came up in black spots.

I then peeled the garlic and put it into the blender along with the tomatoes, a chopped white onion, a teaspoon of Mexican oregano, and a heaped teaspoon of Gran Luchito and blended it all to a textured sauce.

Then I heated a tablespoon and a half of olive oil in a pan and fried the sauce until it reduced and thickened.

The "silk-screen" effect is because one of these tostaditas is actually Cybill Shepherd

These "tostaditas" were  so delicious we had to make another batch right away.

Obviously the toppings were awesome, but I can't stress enough how delicious a good quality tortilla fried (or baked) crisp is. It is truly one of life's great pleasures.

Considering the size of these tortillas, you could almost think of these as garnachas, which some say are the true precursor to American nachos (others, like Thomasina Miers, award that title to chilaquiles).

Either way, you cannot go wrong with this dish.

Another top quality tortilla product from the Cool Chile Company.

Now a note on the photos...

I recently upgraded my phone. For the first couple weeks I noticed the camera had a peculiar bluish tint, and the image quality was somewhat blurry.

Then, after I took the photos for this post, I realized there was a piece of blue protective plastic covering the camera lens

FAIL!

In my defence the reviews of this phone indicated the camera would be quite a disappointment.

Next time the photos should be back to normal.

Tortillas dobladas, or How NOT to puff a panucho

So the other week, when I made pollo pibil, I intended to serve the chicken breast on top of a panucho.

A panucho is a thick corn tortilla stuffed with refried beans, a speciality of Yucatecan cuisine. It was the first type of tortilla I ever made and I was inspired to have another go when I heard my amigo Freddy made them for a dinner party.

In general, corn tortillas should puff during cooking, so they should all have a stuffable pocket. While making this latest batch of panuchos (the first time using my new tortilla press), I paid particular attention to the puffing.

Unfortunately, though the tortillas puffed beautifully, the pockets were to thin and fragile to be stuffed.

They were still tortillas, not panuchos.

Automatic FAIL, right?

Wrong.

I just changed the menu to "tortillas dobladas"!

Tortillas dobladas ("doubled tortillas") is something I came across in Diana Kennedy's Essential Cuisines of Mexico, which is currently my bedtime reading.

Kennedy's recipe, based on a snack she ate on a picnic in Mexico, is basically to spread salsa (either red or green) on a tortilla, fold it over and fry it on both sides.

The result would be a simple but delicious snack in the shape of a half-moon.

Taking inspiration from this, I spread the refried black beans over a tortilla, topped it with another tortilla (I wanted to keep the disc shape), and fried that on each side.

The result was perfect, and so much easier than panuchos that I may just switch to these from now on.

It's as good as a panucho, right?

Holy frijoles!

One of the posts I meant to write last year was about beans. Beans are a staple of Mexican cuisine and pretty much have been since pre-Hispanic times.

In fact, when my fellow food blogger Leslie Limon interviewed prominent Mexican chef Aquiles Chávez, he defined his nation's cuisine as "corn plus beans multiplied by chiles".

And yet beans are so ubiquitous you can easily take them for granted, passing them over for more complicated dishes.

It was Isabel Hood's Chilli and Chocolate that inspired me to cook my own beans (frijoles) from scratch, because she puts bean recipes first - giving them the place they actually deserve.

So last Summer, instead of just buying a tin of beans, I got a half kilo of dried black turtle beans (my favourite kind; I must have Yucatecan ancestry) and made some homemade frijoles de olla (pot-cooked beans: the classic Mexican bean recipe).

Although this took all day, I didn't get any photos. Lame, I know.

Luckily, another fellow food blogger, Lily Ramirez-Foran, has recently done a post about beans.

I basically did what she did, except I didn't use a pressure-cooker. Instead I brought the beans from cold to a vigorous boil on high heat and then reduced the heat and let them simmer for hours and hours.

Like Lily, I recommend making a huge batch and dividing it into several portions for use in other recipes. They freeze and defrost very well.

Right away I used one portion to make pumpkin and black bean soup. Another portion went into a tortilla casserole that even my three-year-old daughter loved.

And one portion got "refried" and went into my tortillas dobladas.

By the way refrito in Spanish means "thoroughly cooked", not "fried again".

In practise you often do make frijoles refritos by cooking them twice, though you can go straight to refried beans from frijoles de olla if you want to.

Either way, they're still only fried once.

I fried my beans in pork lard for an authentic flavour. One of my earliest memories of beans is asking my mother why some cans of beans were labelled "vegetarian" and finding out that beans are traditionally fried in lard in Mexico.

I have one batch of beans left: the batch with the most cooking liquid still in it. My plan is to turn it into a bean sauce and make enfrijoladas, which are like enchiladas but with bean sauce instead of chile sauce.

I'll definitely get pics of that.

How I learned to use a tortilla-press

I got a tortilla-press for Christmas. From "Santa". Also called mi suegra. Which means "mother-in-law".

The good news is I will be making more tortillas from now on.

The bad news is this will probably put the kibosh on learning to roll pastry. (Previously I have been rolling out tortillas, pastry-style, inside a ziploc bag).

I've written about tortillas several times before, but this time I took lots of pictures. So let's do this again.

First, a refresher for the uninitiated:

Tortillas are little Mexican flatbreads made of masa, which is white field corn soaked in slaked lime until the hulls of the kernels come off. (This is called being nixtamalized.)

Then you grind the corn into a dough on a metate, which is one of these:

I don't have one of these. Photo from the Simon Fraser University Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology.

If you dry this dough and pulverise it you get masa harina, which looks like wheat flour but smells like corn.

(Flour tortillas, which you can buy anywhere in the UK, are characteristic of Northern Mexico and the United States.)

The first time I ever made tortillas, they were technically panuchos: Yucatecan tortillas stuffed with refried beans.

I made these because I had no tortilla press and panuchos benefit from being a bit thicker than standard tortillas.

I hand-patted the panuchos into shape the way I'd seen in the film El Norte. It worked, but the panuchos weren't very round.

Later I tried rolling my tortillas out with a rolling pin. This just about worked, but I suck at pastry-rolling, so I never managed a regular shape for these ones either.

They tasted great. Which is just as well.

Worse was I never got an even thickness.

And because The Cool Chile Company sells excellent tortillas, I was on the verge of giving up making my own.

Then I got this.

Hecho en Mexico. Hell. Yes.

So the other morning I got up and made some tortilla dough. As you do:

Tortilla dough from masa harina

250 g masa harina
300 ml hand-hot water
A tbsp olive oil

Combine the ingredients in a mixing bowl, knead for ten minutes, then rest at room temperature covered by a damp cloth for 30 minutes.

Once that was done I heated up a dry frying pan to medium-high, took a golf-ball sized chunk of dough and put it on my tortilla press.

First you must always put a clean sheet of plastic over the bottom of the tortilla press. This stops the dough sticking to the plates.

Dig the Turkish coffee in the background. MexiGeek is a man of many tastes.

 
Then you put the ball of dough down, slightly off-centre (nearer the hinge end), and cover with another sheet of plastic. I used a ziploc bag cut into its two halves.

Now, the trick to flattening your tortilla is applying gentle pressure.

First close the hinge and press down with your hand slowly until it won't give anymore.

Then gently tighten with the bar: just one or two little tugs.

Do not use too much force, as Doug Bell from Lupe Pinto's warned me, or the handle will snap.

Easy does it.

If your dough ball was the right size, you will end up with a perfectly round tortilla about 2 mm thick.

Success!

Once your frying-pan comal has heated up, lay your tortilla in the pan and cook for about 30 seconds.

This is a gringo-style comal.

Flip it over with a spatula and cook 12-15 seconds more.


Then flip it one more time, gently press down on the middle with your spatula, and the tortilla should puff up.

If it doesn't puff, it's not the end of the world, but you'll need to master puffing if you want to make panuchos.

Once the tortilla has puffed, wrap it in a clean, dry cloth to keep it warm, then keep making more tortillas until you run out of dough.

I find I can make about 12 tortillas with this recipe.

There are only ten here, because I ate two. Also, no warm cloth. We'll call that a continuity error.

Ideally tortillas should be served right away, but you can make them in advance and reheat them by steaming them in a cloth for one minute. Or by reheating each one individually on the comal until it gets soft and pliable (my preferred way, actually).

Jeez, I need to write some shorter posts!

This week's MexiFeast: pumpkin and chorizo tacos

I made these tacos last year as well but with butternut squash instead.

This is very easy to make (especially if you already have a pack of Cool Chile Company tortillas).

Chop the pumpkin or squash into tiny cubes. Next time I'm gonna do really tiny cubes, about the same size as the chopped chorizo, so you get squash and sausage in every bite.

Toss the pumpkin in some olive oil, minced garlic, and ground chile. Roast in the oven for 20-30 minutes, until it starts to blacken at the edges.

To avoid over-cooking the chorizo and onions, wait until you know the pumpkin is cooked. Then fry the finely chopped chorizo and diced onion (I actually used shallots) in olive oil until the onion goes translucent.

Now add the pumpkin and fry a few minutes more, until all the flavours mingle.

Wrap in a warm corn tortilla, top with some homemade chipotle sauce (which I'm sure you just have lying around) and provecho!

I also garnished with white pickled onions, a variation on the traditional Yucatecan pink ones.

Review of Cool Chile Company Tortillas

Some Cool Chile Company tortillas, with a few of their friends

Being MexiGeek, I do a lot of labour-intensive cooking. I don't buy tins of chopped tomatoes. I buy fresh tomatoes, asar-roast them, and bash the living hell out of them in my molcajete.


I don't buy ground spices like cumin, clove, and cinnamon. I buy whole seeds or sticks, toast them in a pan until they release their fragrance, and then grind them by hand in my molcajete. (I don't own a spice grinder.)


And I make my own corn tortillas, which takes forever.

But I'm a MexiGeek. That's just what I do. What if you want to eat Mexican food and you don't want to spend your whole night cooking and then eat dinner at 10pm?


When I arrived in the UK in 2001, I couldn't find corn tortillas, even at Mexican restaurants. But now that supermarkets are selling disgusting polenta/wheat flour hybrid things as "corn tortillas", I feel it's my duty to steer my readers in the right direction.

Because you can now get real corn tortillas here in the UK: just order them from the Cool Chile Company.


First a bit of background on Triple C.


The Cool Chile Company began importing dried chiles from Mexico into the UK in the early 1990s. Many, many Mexican recipes call for dried chiles, so they're an essential part of authentic Mexican cuisine. Also, because of the historical ties to India, most fresh chillies available in the UK are Asian varieties. CCC were one of the first (if not the first to make Mexican chiles available in Britain.


Honestly, I could not cook without these guys.


In 2005 they brought in the UK's first ever tortilla press (which they named "Lupita") and began making the UK's first (as far as I know) ever real Mexican corn tortillas. Demand has grown, so Lupita has been replaced by El Monstruo ("the Monster"), which makes 3,500 tortillas an hour.

You can order these tortillas online. They ship anywhere in the UK and Europe.

By the way, I don't know these guys personally. I learned this from their website, which I visit frequently.


I've bought these tortillas a few times. They're a real lifesaver when you want tacos but can't be bothered spending the two hours or so it takes to make a homemade batch.

So how good are they? Well, consider I basically fisked the sub-par Old El Paso tortillas, I feel I should be systematic.

Appearance. Professional. They are perfectly round and just the right colour (because they are made from real masa harina (and not polenta like some commercial brands). Basically, if you placed these next to any of the commercial brands in North America, you could not tell the difference.

Taste. Spot. On.

This is exactly what tortillas are meant to taste like (I should also add that the inviting smell of proper tortillas greets you when you open the pack).

You have to reheat them before using (helpful instructions are on the package). Corn tortillas need to be warm to unlock their flavour. Also, because corn is gluten-free, a cold tortilla cannot be folded like a flour one can.


Texture. Again, spot on, because these are made from just masa harina and water. They have a uniform thickness and when warm they fold easily without falling apart (very important for tacos).

Usefulness. The Cool Chile Company actually sells two kinds of tortilla: soft ones for tacos (the kind I bought) and "frying tortillas", which are a bit coarser and are for making tostadas and totopos (tortilla chips).

I used the soft tortillas for my tacos de carnitas de pollo, and they worked brilliantly as expected. The next day for a snack I heated a tortilla up, put some cheese in it, folded it and finished it off on a hot dry frying pan before drowning it in chile sauce: a rough quesadilla. It was so good I had to make another right away.

And although they don't recommend you fry these tortillas, I found they worked perfectly for baked totopos:

Cut the tortillas into wedges (I used a pizza-cutter).

Preheat the oven to 150° C.

Grease a baking sheet and lay the tortilla wedges on it.

Using a pastry brush, brush them with some oil (I used olive oil, to keep them as healthy as possible).

Then bake for 15-20 minutes. Keep an eye on them so they don't burn. They will continue to crisp a bit as they cool.

Sprinkle lightly with salt as soon as they're our of the oven. These are way more delicious and much healthier than crisps.

So are there any negatives?


Well, as with all professional, machine-made tortillas, they lack the charming irregularity of homemade tortillas. Also, commercial tortillas like these are never slightly charred, they way homemade ones often are.

Also, because these are made from masa harina instead of masa, conventional wisdom holds that you can't use them for enchiladas or chilaquiles, though I actually made chilaquiles with my baked totopos and found they worked fine.

In any case, these aren't really negatives. There's nothing like a fresh homemade tortilla. But if you want it you're gonna work for it. With these on hand, you can have tacos as an easy mid-week meal, instead of a big production thing you have to leave for the weekend.

Bottom line. I really can't fault these. They are, as far as I know, the only authentic corn tortillas available in the UK. It's this or homemade. 

Review of Old El Paso store-bought tortillas

One of my readers recently informed me that corn tortillas are available in Lidl in Edinburgh. Though flour tortilla "wraps" have been in all British supermarkets for as long as I've lived here, the only corn tortillas I was aware of were in prepackaged "taco kits", and they were usually those (American) U-shaped hard-shell things. You didn't used to get proper corn tortillas at all.

And, for the most part, you still don't.

This info about Lidl inspired me to do something I've long wanted to do: review a Mexican food product (or restaurant).

I don't get over to Lidl much now that I don't live in the city centre, but I decided to see of my local super-chain grocery store had anything posing as corn tortillas. Whereas flour tortillas are mainstream enough to be kept in the bread aisle, what they pass off as corn tortillas lurked in the "World Foods" section.

As I expected, they had two brands: Discovery and Old El Paso.

For my British readers, let me tell you about Mexican food brands in the US. We do have Old El Paso, but they mostly sell jarred salsas and spice powders, etc. I never saw Old El Paso tortillas until I moved to the UK.

In America, you buy Mission brand tortillas (they sell both flour and corn). There's even a Mission tortilla factory in the California Adventure park at Disneyland. They'll give you free corn tortillas if it's your birthday. And for commercially produced sauces and seasonings, we tend to go for La Preferida, which is made by and for Mexican-Americans. We don't have Discovery products at all.

Having said that, I have usually gone for Discovery brand products here in the UK, because of the bizarre combination of my mistrust of the familiar (even when I have no reason to trust a non-Mexican brand of Mexican foods) and because I've never rated Old El Paso, even back in the US.

When we couldn't be bothered making our own salsa, my family always bought Pace brand picante sauce, which isn't available in Britain. Pace is made in San Antonio, by folks who know what picante sauce is supposed to taste like. Old El Paso, despite the name, is made in New York City, and that really chaps my hide, as explained in this advert:

Notice that both Pace and Old El Paso are trying to associate themselves with Texas, rather than Mexico. 

However, there is a more serious reason I didn't sample Discovery corn tortillas, despite Isabel Hood's belief that they are better than Old El Paso.

When I got to the "World Foods" section of the giant Morrainsburysco near my suburb, I found that the Old El Paso brand said "now with less fat." Immediately red flags were flying. Why was there any significant amount of fat in the first place?

There are basically two recipes for corn tortillas. The first is the über-traditional (or shall I say "sobre-tradicional") method.

1) Take some white Mexican field corn.
2) Soak it in slaked lime (the same stuff you use to make stucco).
3) Rinse it clean. The tough outer hulls will slip off.
4) Grind it on a metate until it becomes a dough called masa. Shape it into tortillas and cook them on a comal.

White Mexican field corn is hard to come by in Britain, and I don't really endorse using a highly caustic substance like slaked lime in the kitchen. But they do sell masa harina here. I get Maseca, the standard Mexican brand, from Lupe Pinto's. The Cool Chile Company sells it as well, and MexGrocer even sells blue masa harina!. All three suppliers ship throughout the UK.

In case you haven't read my other posts on tortillas, masa harina is white Mexican field corn ground into flour. It is NOT cornflour, cornstarch, cornmeal, or polenta. If you try to make tortillas with any of these things, you will fail. But since you can get real masa harina in Britain, you can make tortillas the modern way, which is:
1) Combine masa harina and hand-hot water and knead it into a dough
2) Let it rest ten minutes, covered with a damp cloth (don't chill it. Mexico is a hot country).
3) Shape the dough into tortillas and cook them on a comal.

In either recipe, there's really only one ingredient: corn. So apart from any naturally occurring fat in the corn itself, there should have been no fat to speak of.

I turned over the package and read the ingredients. I was prepared to see some kind of preservative listed, but I was not expecting to find wheat flour. And, of course, there was vegetable oil as well, because flour tortillas do require some kind of fat to help them bind (traditionally you would use lard).

I checked the Discovery brand. They, too, had a mixture of corn and wheat flour, but Old El Paso listed corn first,  while Discovery listed it second. So I went with Old El Paso.

Appearance. If you look closely at these so-called corn tortillas, you can see tiny flecks of yellow. It wouldn't surprise me if these guys are just mixing polenta in with their flour tortilla ingredients. The ingredients claim it is 29% corn flour, but that could mean anything. I'm guess it doesn't mean masa harina. And it probably does mean they're using the wrong kind of corn.

Do not eat this at home. Or anywhere else.

Taste. Too sweet, and not in a good way, which once again probably means they used the wrong kind of corn: common yellow corn or "sweetcorn" as it's called in Britain. We all love sweetcorn; it rocks. But it does have a pretty high sugar content. White field corn has bigger kernels and is much higher in starch. I haven't tried it, but apparently soup made from this corn has the consistency of potato soup. Tortillas, whether corn or flour, should not be sweet. In fact, you should have to add sugar to the masa harina if you're making sweet tamales.

Texture. Gritty, and somewhat fragile. Partly this is due to the polenta, which is too coarse to mix into a proper dough, and partly this is due to the fact that, since it is basically a corn-flavoured flour tortilla and they reduced the fat, there wasn't enough fat to bind the tortillas properly. Sweetcorn, being less starchy than field corn, cannot pick up the slack.

Usefulness. I don't think anyone, even people relatively unfamiliar with Mexican food, would expect Old El Paso corn tortillas to be very high quality. But can they get the job done?

Well, I ate these all week. I wouldn't recommend them for traditional "soft" tacos, as the flavour is just not there. The package actually recommends you use them for enchiladas, but they mean American-style baked enchiladas, where you fill the tortillas, fold them, put them in a baking dish and cover them with jarred enchilada sauce (they recommend Old El Paso brand; I do not) and bake them until the tortillas get hard and unpleasant.

This probably would work, but the more authentic way to make enchiladas is take the tortilla, dip it in home-made red chile sauce, quick-fry it in some fat, and then fill it and fold it. Messy, but worth it.

When I tried to do this with one of  these, the damn thing disintegrated on me. However, I did manage to quick-fry one in butter, cover it in home-made chile sauce, top it with scrambled eggs and poblano chile strips (huevos revueltos con rajas) and some grated parmesan, which was a very good breakfast, except for the tortilla.

The rajas were fecking awesome. The tortilla, not so much.

Bottom line. My expectations were already low, and yet Old El Paso still managed to fall short. I am a firm believer that we can all make our own corn tortillas, and yet even I have sometimes been put off making tacos because I couldn't be bothered going to all that trouble. So quality store-bought tortillas are a must. But these are not them. If this is really the only thing you can get your hands on, buy some Mission flour tortillas and switch to burritos.