Make Your Own Tortillas Already
By: Summer Anne Burton
Tags: Recipe, Tex Mex, Tortillas, Vegan, Food

I grew up with this kind of food, more than any other. We moved from Arkansas to Texas when I was seven, and the family culinary tradition I remember best was eating out at our favorite local restaurants, and getting too full on free chips and salsa. As a now-reformed picky eater, my go-to was simply gouging myself on salsa and my own personal queso bowl, along with 4–5 flour tortillas served in a little lidded warmer that I’d dip into the warm queso. Honestly, to this day: a perfect dinner. In the drunken haze of my early twenties, lit by the fluorescent lights of the Tex-Mex fast food chain Taco Cabana and the haze of a post-last-call hunger, I graduated to pico + cheese quesadillas… also dipped in queso.

I’m not so picky anymore, and I am drawn most of the time to dishes that have ingredients beyond cheese and flour. But although I’ve evolved from a junk food vegetarian to a home cooking obsessed vegan, many of my favorite foods from my picky years still play a role in my life. When I don’t want to make a decision and just want to feel warm and supported and fed, I turn again to pizza, plain cheerios, and peanut butter sandwiches.

And queso! I’ve perfected my recipe over years of tweaking, and now I concoct a hot orange mix of blended cashews and potatoes, miso, spices, and stirred in salsa, green chiles, and agar-agar for texture that I could probably eat every day.

I’ve made plenty of other vegan staples from scratch, too — salted butter, sourdough bread, fresh pasta — but for whatever reason, I’ve always been intimidated by making my own flour tortillas. Recently, imbued with the can-try spirit of quarantine cooking, I looked up a few tortilla recipes for the basics, and tried my hand at veganizing and adapting based on a few of them (I am incapable of following a recipe without tweaking things, it’s just who I am, I cannot change).

I also cooked a pot of beans, roasted some mushrooms, picked some cilantro, and made a giant pot of cashew queso. All of it was delicious, but one element stood shining above the rest…

You guys…

These tortillas.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I can’t express how good they are, and how much easier they were to make than I expected. For me, the taste of them evoked countless memories of warm stacks of tortillas in plastic warmers set on top of floral oilcloth tablecloths. Maybe my dad is drinking a margarita and I have a perfect fountain coke. Maybe it’s a first date. Or maybe they’re like the soft stacks of warm tortillas served by my favorite vegan taco truck at our wedding last year.

My husband, who is perhaps slightly less personally attached to fresh tortillas, also attested to their goodness: We stuffed them with fillings for tacos, and then when after we claimed we were both full we kept eating them, dipped into queso or just folded into our mouths. I made some the next day for two of my best friends who recently had a baby, dropping it off on their porch along with some beans and cashew queso. Later, they texted me: “THESE TORTILLAS!” I concur.

These are tender, soft, chewy, thin, delicious, and ready to be dipped, filled, or just eaten while they’re fresh out of the skillet. Enjoy!