DIFFICULTY LEVEL: EASY
Tortilla – 50% Whole Wheat
Ingredients
- 348 g Bread Flour I use 11.5% white flour
- 348 g Whole Wheat Flour I use fresh milled organic hard white winter wheat
- 8 g Salt
- 90 g Oil I like a high heat and mild flavored oil like canola or avocado
- 420 g Water
Instructions
- Combine all the dry ingredients together in a mixing bowl.
- Add the oil and water and use a large spoon to incorporate all the ingredients together.
- Mix using a dough hook for 3-4 minutes and rotate the dough in the bowl half way through. The dough should end up with a medium-soft and sticky consistency.
- Allow the dough ball to rest 5 minutes covered with plastic wrap.
- Start heating your tortilla press and griddle. A good griddle temperature is 450F.
- Measure out 41g balls of dough and set aside.
- Press balls in heated tortilla press. Then place pressed tortillas on heated griddle.
- Flip tortillas when bubbles start to form on the surface. Adjust griddle heat as needed to avoid burning. Flip tortillas. Place on cooling rack when done.
Notes
Details
Are you tired of having to run to the supermarket every time you have a tortilla craving? Sick of seeing on the package the long list of preservatives, the lack of healthy whole wheat and the high price? You’ve come to the right place.
This particular recipe uses 50% whole wheat fresh-milled flour and 50% bread flour (ABC+). Of course you can modify this recipe as you please, but if you use less whole wheat flour and more bread flour, you will also need to cut back some water. That’s because the bran in whole wheat flour absorbs more water. For this recipe, if you used 100% bread flour and no whole wheat flour, you would use 370g of water instead of 420g.
I encourage you to use the recipe as-is with the whole wheat simply because the flavor is better and no one in your family will know it’s healthier than the all-white-flour-version. These tortillas come out strong but soft and are great for burritos, soft tacos, quesadillas or just a sandwich wrap. I personally make salmon burritos with mine.
I will discuss fresh milled flour in a later post. Using store bought whole wheat flour is fine, but you may need to adjust the water level slightly. That’s because store-bought whole wheat tends to have less bran and higher moisture levels than a non-tempered home-milled version. See the notes on temper for what this means.
Once the flours are ready, then the salt, water and oil are added. Normally it’s best to avoid adding oil until some mixing has been done so that gluten has time to develop before the oil hits it. For tortillas, gluten development is not that important, so I keep it simple by adding everything at the same time.
Once everything is incorporated, I take it to the mixer and let it go for about 3-4 minutes. I usually find I get a better and more consistent mix if I stop after 2 minutes, scoop out the dough, turn it over in the bowl and then mix another 2 minutes.
It doesn’t need much more than 3-4 minutes total mixing time because strong gluten development is not the goal. In baking terms, this would be called a short mix. The dough should be fairly soft and sticky at the end of the mix.
Once you’re done mixing, place the dough ball on your counter. I use a SilPat silicone mat simply because I am too lazy to clean my counter-top for this process.
At this point, it helps if you cover the dough with some plastic wrap and let it rest for about 5 minutes. Letting it rest gives time for the gluten to absorb all the water and the level of stickiness tends to go down, thus making it easier to handle.
This is a good time to plug in your tortilla press and start heating your griddle.
Once the tortillas are pressed, they need to be “finished” on a hot flat surface (griddle). You can use a pancake griddle, a stove-top version (as pictured below) or even just a non-stick frying pan. The latter will just take a little longer.
I use this plug-in tortilla press (above) which heats both the top and bottom plates.
For the finishing portion, I use a griddle, as shown below. It is a Lodge Cast Iron griddle placed on my gas stove-top and I turn the front two burners to Medium-Heat.
Depending on what you use, the heat distribution and actual temperature will vary. I find the best success with a griddle temperature of around 450F.
Now that everything is heating up, it’s time to pre-weigh your dough balls. For my tortilla press and griddle, I find 41g balls to be perfect.
When I am doing this for real, I typically weigh out some balls, press and start finishing them while I weigh out more balls. In other words, I save time by multi-tasking. For demonstration purposes, I’ve shown all my pre-weighed dough pieces ready to be pressed.
OK, now you’re ready to press the dough. I place a ball slightly above the center line closer to where the hinge of the press is. This is to prevent the tortilla from getting too thin near the area of strongest pressure (near the hinge).
Most non-commerical tortilla presses will have a hinge and handle to press the plates together. This creates a situation where you end up having a very thin tortilla on one end. To compensate, I found it helpful to do it in two presses. After the first press, I flip the tortilla over so the front becomes the back and then I press it a second time. This makes the tortilla thickness much more even and then they finish much nicer on the griddle.
Pressing tortillas DOES take practice. I had to make about 100 before I really got the hang of it. There is some technique that is best learned by simple trial and error. But don’t despair if yours comes out lopsided or uneven in thickness. I promise you, 99 tortillas later, they will be perfect :).
After I have a stack of pressed tortillas, I take them to the heated griddle. They don’t stay there long. As soon as you start seeing some bubbles forming on the surface, you are probably done and can flip them over. You are looking for brown spots underneath on the surface but nothing burnt.
When you’re all done, it’s important not to leave freshly made tortillas out in the open air too long or they will dry out. I keep unused tortillas in the freezer and they taste the same and keep the same texture when thawed. To avoid having them stick together, I place parchment paper between each tortilla and then place the whole stack in a 1 gallon Zip Lock bag.
Did you try this recipe? Have any comments, questions or suggestions? I would love to hear from you below.