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Northern Style Flour Tortillas

Northern Style Flour Tortillas

INGREDIENTS - makes 24 to 30 tortillas

4 cups all purpose flour (avoid flours with high protein content, anything under 13%)
2 teaspoons salt
2 teaspoons baking powder
2/3 cup vegetable shortening, lard, or room temperature butter
1 3/4 cup hot water

Mix dry ingredients. Combine flour, salt, and baking powder in a large bowl.
Add shortening. Add vegetable shortening (or whatever fat you are using) and rub it in with your fingers. It should resemble sand with a few pea-sized pieces of fat.
Knead. Add water and mix to form a wet dough. It will be sticky. Turn out onto a unfloured work surface and knead for 5 minutes. It will be really sticky at first but eventually will form a smooth dough. Use a bench scraper to scrape the dough off the counter as you go if necessary.
Let rest. Grease a large bowl place the dough inside and turn to coat in the oil. Cover with plastic wrap and let rest 20 minutes.
Divide the dough. Pinch off a small piece of dough (a digital scale is really handy for this). The size of the piece will depend on how large your comal or skillet you will be cooking the tortillas on is (a little bigger than a golf ball) which give us 8-inch tortillas. Roll into smooth balls and place on a parchment-lined baking sheet. Cover with a clean kitchen cloth.
Heat the pan. Place a comal or other nonstick skillet over medium heat and let warm at least 3 minutes before you cook any tortillas on it.
Roll the tortillas. Place a ball of dough on a lightly floured counter and flour a rolling pin. Roll each ball into a very thin circle. You should be able to see your hand through it. The thinner the better.
Cook. As you roll place each tortilla on the hot, dry skillet and cook undisturbed until toasted and bubbles cover the surface, about 1 minute. Flip and cook another minute on the other side. Keep warm in a clean towel and repeat with remaining dough.

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Entomatadas alla Pollock

This simple homey Mexican recipe is a comfort food for all who know it, entomatadas like enchiladas or enfrijoladas or enmoladas, all carry the same idea but a different sauce.

Entomatadas have a simple non spicy tomato sauce that reminds one of hugs from la abuela!

Entomatadas alla Pollock

Tortillas Komali 15cm Tradicional

3 Chile Guajillo

2 Chile Arbol

3 tomatoes

1/2 onion

1 garlic

Oil for frying

salt to taste

Fillings: shredded chicken, cheese, or beans

Toppings: crema, chile oil, lettuce, crumbly cheese

Instructions:

1. Prepare your salsa, clean your chiles by taking out the seeds and veins, soak them in hot water until soft. Add all tomatoes, onion, garlic and chiles in your blender and blend until very smooth, salt to taste.

2. Fry off your salsa until it gets a bright red color, then fry off your tortillas until they become flexible and soft. Set them aside.

3. Set up your plate with some salsa at the bottom, dip the tortillas in the salsa and fill them with your desired filling

4. Top them with more salsa and your desired toppings.

Provecho!

Abuela’s Tip: Anytime you’re making salsa Macha or chile oil in your blender is a good time to make this simple tomato sauce, since your blender will be coated with an amazing residual goodness, blend the tomatoes/onion/garlic to clean out your blender and make this recipe without using extra Chiles.

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Easy Bean Soup or Tlatlapas

Why on this hot Summer day are we craving soup, you may ask?

As early as I remember my mother bless her heart, always decided to cook lentil soup (which I hated as a child, now I love 😆), and I guess the tradition stuck because on this hot summer day I’m here stirring and stirring my Mexican frijoles soup.

This soup is traditionally called Tlatlapas which is an ‘easier’ take on cooking dry beans from scratch (that’ll really make your kitchen hot) which I always find way to time consuming and not very satisfying.

Recipe:

Easy Bean Soup or Tlatlapas

500gr of dry beans (any will do)

1/2 onion

1 garlic clove

2 chile arbol

1 chile morita

12 cups of broth or water

olive oil

salt to taste

1. Heat your pan on medium heat and toast your dry beans on low heat, let them cool off and grind them as fine as powder.

2. Fry off your onion and garlic then add the bean powder.

3. Stir until evenly coated and start adding the liquid cup by cup.

4. Stir occasionally until you achieve an even smooth consistency, salt to taste.

Enjoy! Provecho!

There are a lot of known toppings for this soup like nopales in strips, fried strips of chile or epazote. We love this soup with very thin tortilla strips and a mild chile oil.

Abuela's Note: If you don't have a mortero or metate (the traditional way of grinding grains and beans) you can use a blender. If the powder is not fine enough, cook it through as much as you can and blend it until smooth.

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Recipes / mole

Mole Rojo para Enamorarse

Every time I think of mole my memory goes first to my paternal grandmother and great inspiration, my Tita, as she was the ultimate mole queen and cook galore. My second thought goes to Laura Esquivel's novel 'Como Agua para Chocolate' or 'Like Water for Chocolate', the main character, also named Tita (crazy coincidence, maybe all Tita's make the best mole) says something about love which I think can be applied to cooking, especially the cooking of such an intricately delicate dish like mole, she says "El amor no se piensa, o se siente o no se siente" or "You don't have to think about love, either you feel it or you don't". When you endeavor on a dish like mole, the task sometimes seems so daunting with almost 30 ingredients on your list, that you feel it or you don't. Like Tita in Laura Esquivel's novel when she wasn't feeling it her food could basically poison her guests but when she was in the mood her guests could feel it from very deep within ;)

So I invite you to be brave and try one of Mexico's most beautiful dishes the Mole, and to send you off with extra courage and love I share with you the Mole Rojo, so make it with love, for a loved one, a husband, boyfriend, or soon to be, and you'll see how they'll be swooning after just one bite!

Ingredients

Serves 10-12 people

9 oz / 255g mulato chiles, stemmed and seeded

Pinch of aniseeds

Pinch of cumin seeds

2 black peppercorns

2 allspice berries

2 cloves

½ cinnamon stick

4 to 6 Tbsp / 50 to 75g lard

2 whole chickens, cut into serving-size pieces

¼ cup / 30g pine nuts

3 Tbsp / 30 g pumpkin seeds

Scant ¼ cup / 30g black raisins

3 Tbsp / 30 g almonds

¼ cup / 30g hazelnuts

3 Tbsp / 30 g peanuts

¼ cup / 30g pecans

3 Tbsp / 30 g sesame seeds

6 Ritz or other rich-tasting crackers

1 corn tortilla

2 slices fluffy white bread (dinner roll or ciabatta)

½ white onion, coarsely chopped

2 Roma tomatoes, cored and quartered

1 very ripe (black) plantain, peeled and cut into chunks

1 large garlic clove

5 oz / 140g semisweet chocolate

¼ cup / 60ml water

6 cups / 1.4L chicken stock

Directions

First, lightly toast the chiles by placing them on a hot, ungreased comal or in a skillet over medium heat, turning them constantly as they heat up and begin to release their fragrance. Before they turn brown, remove them from the heat and submerge them in a bowl of water to let them soak and soften while you prepare everything else.

Next, you are going to toast all of the spices on your hot, dry comal or in an ungreased skillet. You should do this in batches because they have different toasting times, beginning with the ones that will toast the fastest: the anise and cumin. As soon as you can smell these toasted seeds, take them off the comal or skillet and place them in a spice grinder. Now do the same with the peppercorns, allspice, cloves, and cinnamon stick. After they’re toasted, add them to your spice grinder and grind the spices together. Dump the ground spices into a large bowl. You will be frying things in batches that you will be adding to this bowl. Eventually, all of this will go into the blender, but for now, you need a place to store the mole ingredients as you prepare them to be blended together.

Now sear the chicken that you are going to cook in the sauce. Melt 4 Tbsp / 50g of the lard in a Dutch oven or large heavy-bottom skillet over medium-high heat. When the lard has melted completely and is shimmering, place as many pieces of the chicken in the pot as you can fit without crowding. The goal here is to brown each piece, so be sure they’re not overlapping. Sprinkle them lightly with salt and flip them over so that both sides get seared. When they look golden, using tongs, transfer them to a platter and repeat with the rest of the chicken pieces, adding more lard to the pan as needed.

The chicken should be just seared and not be cooked though at this stage because it will continue cooking in the mole sauce.

Once you’re finished searing the chicken, keep whatever grease and drippings remain in the Dutch oven or skillet to fry other things. You want about ½ inch / 12mm of shimmering oil in the bottom of the pan, and you will have to add more lard as needed. You are going to be frying the nuts and seeds in batches because, depending on their sizes, they will cook at different rates. You are looking for each thing to turn golden but not dark brown.

Begin with the pine nuts, pumpkin seeds, and raisins. Once you can smell the fragrance of these nuts and seeds and they look golden, remove them with a slotted spoon and place them in the big bowl with the spices. Now fry the almonds, hazelnuts, peanuts, and pecans until they are fragrant and golden and then add them to the big bowl. Fry the sesame seeds by themselves, being extra careful to monitor them the whole time and moving them around with a wooden spoon or spatula as they fry because they can burn quickly. Add the sesame seeds to the big bowl.

Remember to add more lard to the pan when you need it, since the nuts and seeds will likely have soaked it up. Once the added lard has melted and is shimmering, fry the Ritz crackers very briefly, because they burn fast, then the tortilla, and finally the bread, placing it all in the big bowl with all of the previously toasted and fried ingredients. Add more lard if needed and fry the onion, tomatoes, plantain, and garlic until everything is golden and a bit stewy, then add it all to the big bowl.

In a small saucepot, combine the chocolate with the water and heat until the chocolate melts. Turn off the heat while you blend your sauce ingredients. Due to the amount of volume here, you are going to need to blend your sauce in batches. Know that from this point on, everything is getting blended together and then simmered, so the order in which you blend things doesn’t much matter.

You want a ratio of about 1:1 of stock to solid ingredients. I would suggest blending a couple of cups of solids at a time (4 cups / 960ml total, including the stock). When the contents of the blender are liquefied, dump it into your largest stockpot and then repeat the process. Finally, blend the soaked chiles with the remaining stock and add this to your pot, along with the melted chocolate, and stir well to combine.

Bring the mole to a simmer over medium-low heat. Drop the chicken into the pot and cover. Let it simmer for 20 to 25 minutes, then serve. The mole can be stored in a sealed container in the refrigerator for 3 to 4 days or frozen for up to 3 months.

Recipe Courtesy of “My Mexico City Kitchen” Cookbook.

Publicado en 29 mayo 2021

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Northern Style Flour Tortillas

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Recipes / mole

Mole Rojo para Enamorarse

Ingredients

Directions