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.

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!

Breakfast with MexiGeek: scrambled egg taco

This is a fried tortilla, almost like you'd make for authentic enchiladas, only I didn't dip it in sauce.

First I cracked two eggs into a mixing bowl, seasoned them with salt and pepper, dried epazote, and ground chiles.

Then I beat them until not quite combined. Never over-beat your eggs.

Next I fried the corn tortilla in butter: about 30 seconds on the first side, then a little less than 10 seconds on the other side.

Then I removed the tortilla to a plate. It should not be crisp.

Over a medium heat, I melted some more butter. When it was hot, I added some cumin seeds and let them fry for a few seconds (a technique from Indian cooking).

Then I added the eggs and gently scrambled them until just done.

"Scrambled eggs" in Spanish are huevos revueltos, which means "thoroughly turned eggs", so I always use a circular motion when scrambling.

At the very end I added a teaspoon of my homemade chipotle sauce.

I put the eggs in the tortilla, folded it over, and topped with more sauce.

¡Provecho!

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.