Trial, Error, and Experimentation: Tortillas in the Test Kitchen

I’m one of those petulant children who asks “why” a lot.

And while this way of needing to understand the world generally drives anyone in my immediate vicinity crazy with follow-up questions, the same train of thinking is a veritable weapon of mass construction for cooking.

I need to know why everything happens, often down to scientific explanations I may not fully understand (but manage to employ nonetheless.)

Having a basic grasp of food chemistry, or “why” ingredients behave the way they do, is absolutely necessary when it comes to playing in the kitchen.

In fact, the majority of my off-book cooking is successful due to my grasp of an ingredient’s physical or chemical properties (in conjunction with a heavy handed application of the scientific method.)

Take these “tortillas” I made last night.

He doesn’t eat corn. She’s avoiding carbs and doesn’t eat most animal products. And I don’t want to stop what I’m doing and go to the store so that I can make what I want to make.

But I know something about tortillas: they are made from very few ingredients.

Knowledge is knowing that something is made from three or four ingredients. Wisdom is knowing why those ingredients play well together.

Traditional corn tortillas are made with two things: masa harina and water. Sometimes you might add a little salt, or perhaps a little fat in the case of flour tortillas. But for the most part, humans in Central America have been making this two ingredient unleavened bread for centuries.

To anyone who has done any baking, the combination of corn flour and water initially sounds like a recipe for crumbly disaster. That is, until you understand why masa harina works the way it does.

Nixtamalization

The masa you buy at the store was once corn that was soaked and cooked in an alkaline solution of water and lime before being hulled and ground and packaged for your use at home.

Why is this important?

During the cooking process, the hulls on the corn kernels are damaged, which allows water to interact with the internal starches. We could get way too deep into the science behind this, but suffice it to say, from a chemical point of view, the gelatinization of maize starch is completely dependent on this nixtamalization process.

But why is explaining any of this important though, if I’m planning on making tortillas without masa?

Well, we have to understand why the few ingredients in tortillas “stick” together.

And now we know: much like wheat and semolina starches absorb water and expand, resulting in light, fluffy, fresh pasta, so too do the gelatinized corn starches in masa behave similarly for tortillas.

(But where am I going with this…)

In order to get something without traditional grain starches (that inherently gelatinize) to “stick” together, a structural equivalent must be put into play.

Enter soluble fiber.

Many vegan and vegetarian cooks know that, because of their predisposition for “gelling” when their external microfibers are exposed to water, chia and flax seeds can both be suitably used as egg replacements in many applications.

But that’s not why I want them.

I want them because I think that they might also behave very similarly to gelatinized starches.

I’ve been testing this lately with various cracker recipes. Due to the tiny microfibers that chia seeds are naturally covered with, they appear to be able to act as both binder and filler.

Which is great if you’re using other ingredients that don’t exhibit any particularly useful chemical properties and are mostly just flavor and fiber (in my case, perfectly good juicer pulp.)

These “tortillas” still need a little work and so, while I’ll be sharing my first attempt methods, you will not be getting a precise “recipe” at this moment.

This post is more about my process.

To learn is to “Pinterest Fail”

I started with a few handfuls of juiced carrot shavings (maybe 2–3 cups), some leftover almond flour for nuttiness and body (about a quarter cup), and about a quarter cup of mixed chia and flax seeds.

The chia and flax were put in their own bowl with about a cup and a half of water. Once they had absorbed the liquid, I gave them a stir and added a little more water until they were closer to a slurry consistency. (You don’t want to try and mix them in with the other ingredients if they’re too gelled, as they will quickly become a puck of seed glue.)

I then throughly combined everything in the larger bowl and attempted to roll a tortilla out.

No dice.

As far as I can see, the biggest advantage to making doughs with grain starches that “internally” gel is that they form chemical bonds from the inside, allowing them to stick to each other a little bit better than they stick to anything else. These bonds can be further manipulated and coaxed into submission with the addition of the same pulverized grain starch in its dry form, which is why I’m pretty sure we flour surfaces before rolling dough out.

Such is not the case with soluble fibers. While they exhibit similar properties in terms of binding to other things, they are far less submissive, especially in the case of chia seeds, as their bonds are a little less chemical and a little more externally structural.

(This means they stick to everything they touch.)

However, once these microfibers begin to dry, they “tangle” into the microscopic surfaces of whatever they’re next to and hold (or glue) those surfaces together.

Which is why we can use them in place of eggs.

Or gelatinized starches.

“Flouring” the rolling surface with cornstarch proved unsuccessful, as a dissimilar starch wanted nothing to do with this dough.

So how to get them to not stick, if we can’t roll them out?

I tried the wrap/freezer method as I do for many delicate doughs, but they still crumbled before hitting the pan.

Then I pressed a ball of dough into a pan, but what resulted had the thickness of something like an arepa.

The aha moment in all of this was noticing that the chia and flax binders behaved much like eggs when introduced to heat, evenly drying and forming a crust, so if I could find a way to thinly spread the “dough” in the pan quickly enough, the dots would hypothetically connect and I’d be left with something akin to a tortilla.

Enter more liquid.

I added a few quick splashes of water into the mixing bowl and stirred until the consistency of my dough became something about twice as thick as pancake batter. I also mixed in a little olive oil, because I wanted these to brown a bit as they cooked (and I really dig the robust smoky flavor that olive oil can pull from a cast iron pan, oxidation be damned.)

I then used a restaurant sized metal serving spoon to scoop portions of dough into the pan, let the center of the dough drop set for a few seconds to give an anchor point, then working quickly, used a fish spatula to pull and spread the dough from the center outward until it was the thickness I desired.

Perhaps getting them to flip so you can cook the other side proves the greatest challenge in all of this, but if you can flip an egg or a pancake in the air, you should be fine. It’s that quick, confident swooping motion with the pan that you’ll need to practice, as any attempts to pick up and turn with a spatula may result in a crumbled mess.

In the end, I decided I needed a little more binder, as they were slightly too crumbly to roll for dinner, so the dough also got an egg. (Or two. Don’t judge me. I ran out of time and I have one job and that’s to get dinner on the table by 9pm, ruining my own scientific methods be damned.)

Anyway, these worked out really well, and we had “tortillas” that I was able to stuff full of beans and roasted butternut squash and cheese and roll and cover in sauce and bake, and the texture was still on point (though these little protein fiber bombs were seriously filling!)

Thoughts for next time:

• Flaxseed flour may prove a better method of gel distribution and allow for easier spreading in the pan than the whole seeds did. It would be really nice to be able to pour and swirl these like you would with a crepe. (I was experimenting without researching or I would’ve gone this route instead… and probably not have needed those extra eggs in the end.)
• Sweating the juiced veggies, with either heat or “cold” with salt, may ultimately create a more pliable texture for dough, as well as coax out some more interesting flavors than utilizing raw, slightly dried vegetable pulp did.
• Playing with higher nut flour ratios could certainly help the flavor in terms of tasting more like a bread item; however, I am slightly hesitant to do this as most of my experiments with nut flour tend to be on the crumblier side, and we’re looking for pliability here. May look into soaked chickpea flour as well, given the aquafaba rabbit hole I’ve been lurking in lately. (I’m not interested in coconut flour because the flavor imparted for these sorts of savory applications does not appeal to me.)

For the curious, I was inspired by a starter course from a dinner out this past weekend, and so these were served with a zucchini gazpacho.

…and chocolate lava cake.

(Because you can mark any dinner as a win if it’s finished with lava cake, amirite?)

Foodie scientists following along, I’d love for you to chime in in the comments below- what else would you do differently to make these work better? Would pulverizing them in a blender somehow help me take greater advantage of my ingredients? Let me know!