can you plug my only vs too that'd be really dope if you could just thanks dude I appreciate [Music]
you I've made flour tortillas and corn tortillas but I've never had somebody actually teach me
how to do it right and we're here with Jonathan Zaragoza and that's exactly what he's going to
do teach me how to make tortillas right together together hell yeah so three things that make a
perfect tortilla is the texture of the Masa really nicely milled we're going to hydrate it with some
water grant demoing that right here shaping right how thin we press it the size of it you're going
to need a bag and a tortilla press the bag is really important otherwise you're going to press
a really nice tortilla but never be able to get it off your machine and then how we cook it you need
a heat source right now we're using a wood-fired grill behind us and some comales. sSo we have two
here we have a cast iron here and then we have a clay one, very traditional really nice to see
because it has the calcium hydroxide kind of tacal around it and that just acts as a nonstick surface
this feels very easy to break super easy that's why we're going to use this one today okay yeah
the first step of making really good tortillas which is in Spanish we call it in masand lamasa
just means getting your dough ready working it needing it giving it some love all right
so we're going to pull this off just a little bit you're just guessing yeah we'll do half it's all
feel man and usually you said it was about 50 gram or 2 ounces for tortillas yeah yeah I'd say like
a 50 gram 45 gram is a good size all right you want to add a little bit of water to this do I
I'll tell you when uh feels so right now that's perfect dri so yeah right now I'm going to show
you guys like what we're dealing with here you could see like the scraggly bits here it's all
kind of like cracking it's telling you that it needs water so I'm going to squish it down like
that and you'll see like even more cracked edges so you got to think about it when you press it
thinner it's just going to accentuate all those cracks you can just like rip all the way up in
yeah it's yeah and then it's going to dry it on the kumal so we need some water all right grant
put a little bit in the bowl Great Sound just going to need this so yeah we're just looking
for the Masa to kind of stick to our hands just a little bit but not too much where it doesn't
release from our hands as well and it's not like a bread dough where it's got all this gluten and
it's getting tougher and tougher and tougher and tougher no actually Masa likes to be needed it's
feeling good man feeling real good and you can see it pulled away from the bowl mhm you know
there's no like extra pieces around you see that so I'm going check in it right now and you can see
how smooth it is see that difference the texture difference we'll smash it out so there and then
I'm going to flip it and do the old little wiggle test so you're going to flip it and then give it
a couple that feels good to me dang I know it's weird right it's like everyone has their thing
like that's making tortillas but for me that's always been like the kind of like litmus test is
like it's look but it it'll release and my hands pretty clean love it so this is exposed to the
air here right and we just hydrated it perfectly it's going to keep still drying that now yeah so
maybe with a towel with an atomizer on top little plastic little plastic we're we are going to do
old school so we're just going to cover our bowl of Masa with a uh damp towel while we get the
rest of our equipment going so we're going to go into shaping two things you need you need a
plastic bag reuse right what' you say reduce reuse recycle I can't do that that's what we learned in
elementary school really yeah but we barely do it Chicago Public Schools man you know what I mean so
what I like doing is for this kind of cut in the diameter of your pressing Zone I thought the knife
was making that sound for a bit I was like what kind of knife is this Harry Potter yeah I know I
got from him and then we're going to cut the edges off all right this comes off okay and then we have
a tortilla press here that we're gonna press it out in so we have our Masa texture right where
we want it all we need to do is shape it two things that you need a tortilla press number
one and a plastic bag so we're going to start with a I don't know how many grams do you think that is
man I feel like you you want to do maybe mine's a little this is perfect no no this is perfect so I
like giving it a little three finger press there and then giving it a palm so you get nice little
circle shape and then don't use all your strength you just need a little bit there and because a lot
of these rilla presses are a little uneven you can give it 180° cuz one side's thinner than the other
and then that'll kind of help us pull that perfect tortilla off of it okay so our tortilla is pressed
out already let's talk about the movement going to the kumal a lot of people have different ways
to do it um I have a tortilla lady that works for me that does it overhand which is usually
a technique saved for flower tortillas but it works for her this is the way I do it so we're
going to take our tortilla that's perfectly thinly pressed here and then go to the kumal so one thing
that you need to do is kind of just come to the kumal closer than you think you need to be and
then just let the wrist kind of turn away from it and then the tortilla is gone it's ready to
be cooked so we're going to get into the cooking and what you need to look for visual cues to make
sure your tortilla is perfectly cooked tortilla is nice and thin and pressed out I'm going to go
to the Kad here so my motion is a little kind of flick of the wrist this way and a release that's
the way I do it what I'm looking for is just for this to release a little bit I can see like it's
releasing K looks a little bit hot that's a nice color right there that leoparding is really nice
we want that another important thing is to keep your cimal clean so if you get some of this you
can kind of just give it a wipe usually when you like put your tortilla on one side it needs
to recover that side needs to recover a little bit so then I'll flip it on another side that'll
recover I'll flip it on the other side so then you can have just work different zones of your
Cal usually at a restaurant it's a lot bigger this is obviously a smaller one we can maybe
fit two on here you just kind of have to budget like your your space here so here I can feel like
Mar is really nice and cooked beautiful on the outside you know the quintessential puff you can
use a towel like this and make it puff a little bit but if it doesn't it's not the biggest deal
in the world there's a lot of factors that go into making your tortilla puff we talked
about texture so the grind the elasticity the moisture content the Press thickness
so there's a lot of things working against the puff all right let's get going on the rest of
them the comal workflow at my restaurant is a one person station they have their press here
they have their Masa to their left and then they have their finishing basket or where
the tortillas end up after the comal. The comal will be on their right so we will press it out
and then the tortilla from the Press will go to the right from the comal on the right they will
go into the basket it does take a lot of practice but that's the way we do it at our restaurant so
again on here you're looking for the tortilla to release from the comal kind of get your finger
under there and feel for it that one's going to release and then you flip it over and again this
has to do with a lot of surface temperature I can tell by the tortilla here I have some
uncooked spots that means my gal's a little too hot you want it to be a little bit cooler than
this surface temp-wise this way you just kind of have an even cooking surface and it's not too hot
or too [Music] cold so we got our tortillas in front of us we got three things working with what
we just have so Masa texture proper hydration Masa grinds very important and then pressing
it so getting it super thin on the tortilla press with the plastic on there the shape of it and also
the cooking so you want a comal that's around you know like maybe 400 Degrees surface hemp or just
hot enough to get it cooked then you're looking for visual cue so just when it starts releasing
from the pan around the edge it's good for the first flip and then same thing on the other side
and feeling around and you know it's a lot of f so I'm going to show you how my grandma used
to serve the tortillas so when I serve it at the restaurant first of all when you grab tortillas
out of a pile don't never grab the top one cuz the warmest one's right in the middle and so this is
your tortilla you see steaming still and when we serve it at the restaurant this side's facing up
when we're ready to Plate we play on this side the we're going to season it with salt this is what my
grandma used to do and then might be a little bit too much salt but not never right there's
different ways to eat a tortilla you can roll it like that and then squish it she used to squish it
like that there you go and then that's your burro I love these things this is what happens when you
take a lesson from a pro I probably learned about 20 things today about tortillas but I
think we're packing probably like four or five of them into the video make sure to go to chefs.com
we got a whole package on masa, tortilla making you can get a lot of Jonathan's recipes there
too tortillas bro let's get it love it these are really [Music] good subscribe to our channel and
visit chefsteps.com for more tips recipes guides and tools to help you level up in the kitchen
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