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Flour Tortillas

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  • Author: Emily
  • Prep Time: 40 min
  • Cook Time: 2 min
  • Total Time: 50 min
  • Yield: 10-12 Tortillas 1x

Ingredients

Scale
  • 1/2 C Room Temperature Butter (plus extra for greasing the dough)
  • 2 1/2 C All Purpose Flour (plus extra for dusting)
  • 12 Tsp Salt
  • 1 C. Room Temperature Water

Instructions

Crumb butter, salt, and flour. Add half of the water and mix with your hands. Add remaining water. Add the water half at a time makes it easier to mix in all the water since the dough is very wet. Sprinkle about 1/4 cup of flour on your work surface and knead the dough until it is stretchy but no longer sticky. NOTE: The dough needs to be very wet to create flexible tortillas. Resist add in more and more flour. The more you work the dough, the more it will come together.

Form the dough into a ball and rub with some butter to prevent a skin from forming. Place dough in a bowl and cover with a wet tea towel or plastic wrap. Place in a warm spot (e.g., in a cold oven with the light on, on a window sill, even outside) for 15-20 minutes. This allows the gluten to relax, don’t skip this step!

Take dough out of the bowl and form 10-12 smaller balls. 

Once all the balls of dough are formed, place them on your work surface one at a time. Make a cage with your fingers and roll the dough around for 10-15 seconds. This helps seal the dough. Repeat with remaining dough. Rub butter on all the balls of dough and rest uncovered for 5-10 minutes. Again, we want the gluten to relax for soft flexible tortillas!

Preheat cast iron skillet  to a medium heat. Truly medium! You don’t want the skillet too hot because that results in crunchy tortillas. And you don’t want it too low because it won’t cook the tortillas fast enough, also resulting in crunchy, non-flexible tortillas.

Add 1/2 cup of flour to a small plate. One at a time, press each ball of dough into the flour, creating discs. Flour each side. Shake excess flour onto your work surface. The dough will absorb this extra flour. Roll into an oblong shape then rotate 90 degrees. Roll out more until you have a circle. NOTE: These do not need to be perfect circles, they will still be delicious! Roll as thin as you can. These tortillas are so soft they should slightly stick your work surface. Not so much that you can’t pick them up, but don’t have so much flour under them that they can’t stretch.

Grab the side furthest from you and place on hot skillet. Wait for tortilla to bubble up and flip. Flatten slightly (pop the largest bubbles) to ensure even baking. This whole process should take no more than two minutes. Repeat for remaining tortillas.