Cooking Tortillas

We made flour tortillas in class yesterday. It was a basic recipe that called for neither baking powder nor lard, as those are expensive and sort of hard to find in China. I’m attaching the Taste of Home recipe link. I measured and mixed, and stirred with a spoon until it got to the point where you should mix it by hands, and then plunged my hands in. There was an audible gasp from the students that I would do this. I then showed them how to roll out the dough, and managed to roll out a tortilla that was miraculously round.

Throughout the experience, students kept making suggestions:
Teacher, maybe next time you should add some chopped onions!
There are some chemicals you can add (I think he was talking about baking powder, but I'm not really sure) that will make it fluffier!
Are you sure we shouldn’t be cooking them in oil?
You shouldn’t use water that is so hot in the dough- it will cook the flour!
I ignored them as I cooked the tortillas in a frying pan balanced on a hot place balanced precariously on a rather unsteady chair at the front of the class. The students were also shocked when I just reached in and pulled out the tortilla to flip it. They thought we ought to use some kind of utensil. I told them that if the abuelitas in Mexico could do it with their fingers, so could they, and made them try it, which was hilarious.

I have one boy who is very strange and has some kind of mental something or other going on, and is very annoying, and after cooking his tortilla, he got so excited: "I've never cooked anything on a fire before!" If I were his mother, I would probably have kept him away from a hot stove at all costs, as the kid is an utter disaster. Fortunately, I am his heartless Spanish teacher and didn’t really care if he scorched his fingers. He was delighted! Then he made another tortilla so he could do it again. I’m not sure how many fingers he burned in the process…

If the boys in the class wanted to eat a tortilla, I told them they had to roll out and cook their own- I wasn’t rolling out 30 tortillas! Some of the guys really got into it, and participated, and when there was extra dough, made another one, they liked it so much. Some of the others were wimps. In this group of three boys, only one was brave enough to flip the tortillas, so the others made him do theirs as well.

It was agreed that the tortillas were good, but that they had something that was pretty much exactly the same in China. They showed me pictures of a food I’ve eaten here before. It is sort of like a tortilla except that it contains an entire fried egg cooked into the batter and is square. “But they roll things up in a tortilla to make a burrito,” I said, showing them pictures of burritos. “We do that with ours as well!” They said, showing me pictures of a common food we eat for lunch, that was pretty much exactly the same as a burrito, except it contains fried chicken, mayonnaise, seaweed, and cucumber. Along with the entire fried egg in the square wrap. So pretty much tortillas and burritos are typical Chinese cuisine.

My students love cooking, and have enjoyed the three times we’ve had food. When we do eat, I bring a bag with wheels to carry the foods to class, and now they know to look for it. Earlier this week, I showed up with the bag, and they excitedly said “Are we cooking!?” When I started getting things out, it involved two bags of rocks, and two girls came up looking in them hopefully and then looked up to say “So, are we cooking?” If anyone knows of a hispanic recipe for rocks, please pass it along!

I hope you have as much fun making these tortillas as I did!