My Appetizing Life

First thing first! The ingredients for the flour tortillas are all-purpose flour, baking powder, salt, hot water and vegetable shortening.
You can use a pastry cutter, fork or your best tool, your hands!

In a large bowl combine the dry ingredients.Add the vegetable shortening and mix in until the mixture becomes crumbly.

Next, add the hot water into the dry mix and with a fork continue to fold.

Once the dough mixture comes together, with your hands begin to kneed it, all while using the dough to get all the excess flour from around the bowl.

The dough should end up like this! You will know it’s ready when the bowl is starting to look clean again and the dough is very soft and pillowy! By this point it should NOT be hard nor sticky. You can always add more flower or hot water to remedy. But just use the right measurements and it should A-OKAY!

Place a kitchen towel over the dough and let it rest! Trust me the longer you leave it the softer it will be! (it’s just like marinating a good piece of meat). Leave it at least 10 to 15 minutes.

While the dough is resting go ahead and pre-heat your comal (cast iron skillet)to about medium to medium-high heat.
If you don’t have a comal, don’t worry! a regular pan skillet will do the job just right. The only downside to this is might be having to cook one at a time. Hmm… might want to take out twos killets.

Another option that my mom used was an electric skillet! When she made dozens of tortillas for the week, the electric skillet gave her all the space needed for multiple tortillas and it worked.

Once the dough rested enough, go ahead and start pulling the dough and begin to roll out dough balls.

The size really depends on you! If you are needing large tortillas for burritos or wraps you might want to make a bigger ball. Other than that, a little smaller that the size of your palm should be good.

Dust your surface and rolling pin with a generous amount of flour. 
A little tip from what my mom taught me is to always dust the dough balls with flour as soon as you ball them up. I have seen many people who leave them out and I feel like that dries them out too fast, I actually use the same canister of flour to place them in…less dirty dishes!

Here’s the tricky part! Okay not tricky, but it can get very frustrating if you can’t get a perfect tortilla shape you desperately want!
Flatten the dough with the rolling pin, it should really look like a “portrait”of an oval. You are going to flip the flattened dough to the other side by laying it on a “landscape view”. You will roll that again, then flip back to“portrait view”. You will continue to do this back and forth until you have your desired thickness and holds the shape of a circle. 
Gosh I hope that made sense! It did in my head!

When you have your tortilla dough you can start placing them on the comal/skillet, the tortilla itself should start looking a little whiter and little pockets of air should start building up. When you see that… FLIP! If your comal/skillet is at the right temperature your tortillas should start to puff up and when that happens you can start to release the steam by pressing down with a folded up kitchen towel. But really once it’s puffed up, it’s ready to come off the skillet!

There you have it! Homemade flour tortillas!!They are so soft and perfect and hold up well. You can store the flour tortillas in a tight container in a cool and dry place. I like to use large zip-lock bags and store it in the fridge!