My love for Mexican food is no secret. Or perhaps I should say Mexican-inspired food as I’m quite sure our most often gobbled meals are more Tex-Mex than authentically, pure Mexican. Hungry Hubby is very partial to a tortilla, no matter how it comes so imagine my delight when KitchenCraft sent me my very own tortilla press to play with and review!
To trial this simple contraption, designed to easily press out tortilla dough into pretty much perfectly round flatbreads of even thickness, I turned to my bread making guru Dan Lepard. I love that man. His wheat corn tortillas, as can be found on the Guardian website here, where my first attempt at homemade tortillas. I liked how whilst there was not one gram of yeast added to the dough, the lager used seemed to do the job of a lengthy prove in developing the flavour of the tortillas. Easy so far.
Doing some reading around to find out how to get the best from my press, I quickly learnt that if you use the dough directly in the press, you may find it sticks to the metal which can even flake off. I must point out I read this as a general comment of traditional Mexican presses, not the KitchenCraft one I’m using here.
However, I decided not to take the chance and use a plastic food bag which I cut to open out flat when pressing the dough. Once you are armed with this knowledge and some dough to practice with, you are a mere few minutes away from heating your pan and cooking up a batch for yourself. It takes seconds to process each indidvual tortilla and I was really pleased with how uniform they came out.
The only thing to bear in mind at least with this recipe, is that the dough shrinks once removing it from the plastic bag quickly so you need to stretch it out a bit as you transfer it to your preheated pan. If anyone has any experience here please do leave me a comment as I’d love to know if it was just me!
So once you have your colourful tea towel filled with tortillas what to do with them? We often have them fajita style with spiced chicken, salsa, guacamole, salad and cheese. Enchiladas are great for day old fajitas – fill the wraps with your choice of meat or veg in a tomato sauce, roll up and top with some more tomato sauce and grated cheese.
I like them for breakfast with a fried egg and chilli sauce on or cut into triangles, sprayed with oil and seasoned as you please before baking to make your own tortilla chips (or Doritos 😉 ). This time, having had a really busy day and neither of us wanting too much fuss, we simply had our wheat corn tortillas with chicken goujons coated in my not-so-secret KFC recipe with plenty of added chilli powder for kick and a feta salad.
We couldn’t have a tortilla without a cold beer either 😉
Check out the rest of the KitchenCraft range here and in particularly, this handy dandy press.
This looks great
-Shini