Eating in quarantine: Chicken tacos with homemade flour tortillas

In the before times I didn’t do that much cooking outside the weekends. But now, with nothing but time on my hands I’m cooking all the time and trying some new things from time to time. I haven’t jumped on the breadmaking bandwagon, but I did come close by making homemade flour tortillas for my chicken tacos yesterday.

Some googling had confirmed it’s a pretty simple recipe and it really was, and with a few technique changes I was quite happy by the end with how most of them turned out. And I already have some ideas to kick the next batch up a notch. But first, taco fixings.

After my weekly trip to the newish Farm Boy on Metcalfe (way better than Massine’s, but keep that on the DL) I was well provisioned with fresh veggies and all the fixings. First step, dice and sauté my chicken breasts with garlic and red peper flakes with avocado oil, then set aside.

While the chicken was cooking I prepped my yellow pepper, onion and mushrooms, and then set the chicken aside and proceeded to sautee the veggies in the same manner.

I picked up a packet of chicken taco sauce at Farm Boy as a seasoning cheat (my limited pantry is pretty full already) so after heating the sauce in my pan I added back in the chicken and veggies and set that aside to simmer while I moved on to the tortillas.

I found a simple flour tortilla recipe on the interwebs which I modified based on the comments and my own whims. Mix two cups flour and one tablespoon sea salt, then add 1/3 cup avocado oil (called for olive but works fine) and then stir in ¾ cup of water. What you get is a pretty stick ball of dough you let rest for a few minutes.

There are two keys to success here: use lots of flour, and after portioning the dough into 8, roll them into balls. This will help you get closer to roundish tortillas.

While heating my cast iron pan on medium heat, I rolled out a ball of dough as thinly as I could.

I then very carefully transferred it to the pan, which I had given a spray with cooking spray. About sixty to ninety seconds is enough time to roll out the next one.

Some nice light browning as the other side cooks after the flip, and then the completed tortilla goes into a pan in my pre-heated oven to stay warm while the tortilla making continues.

Now it was taco time. My chicken veggie mix was complemented by tomatoes, green onions, salsa, sour cream and, just for fun in a last minute addition, pineapple. I was so excited that for my first taco, I forgot the cheese.

The pineapple was a pleasant addition, and the tortillas were warm, tasty and certainly had more texture than the store-bought versions.

Homemade tortillas are defintiely much better than the store versions, no surprise there. Without a tortilla press they don't look super round or uniform but that's fine, they're bespoke. It's all simple ingredients you likely have in your pantry and the technique is easy enough. What it does take is time, maybe half an hour to prep and cook eight tortillas. But when you have time, as we do now, it's definitely worth doing.

Next time I'd like to try to fancy up the dough with some seasonings. Definitely think there's room for innovation there.

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