This holiday is a wonderful opportunity for everyone to celebrate the culture and the flavors of Mexico, no matter what their heritage may be. One of the definitive elements of Mexican cuisine is the tortilla, a simple, round flatbread eaten with just about every meal in Mexican households. These delicious discs come in two basic varieties-corn, and flour. Both varieties are common in Tex-Mex cooking, although corn tortillas are much more traditional in Mexico.
Corn tortillas begin with a type of specially treated corn flour called masa harina .
The kernels are then drained, crushed, and dried. The resulting flour needs only to be mixed with water and kneaded into a pliable dough in order to make tortillas. You can find masa harina at many supermarkets, or at your local Mexican grocery store. Flour tortillas are different from corn tortillas in that they contain wheat flour rather than corn flour, and include the additional ingredients of baking powder and shortening or lard. These pale cousins of the corn tortilla are usually made larger and thinner because the gluten in the wheat flour allows the dough to be stretched without falling apart.