Make the Bread, Buy the Butter - Jennifer Reese [63]
2. Heat an ungreased skillet until very hot. With a rolling pin, roll each ball of dough into a rough circle 6 to 8 inches in diameter. Don’t worry about rolling it out as thin as you possibly can; this isn’t strudel dough.
3. Place a tortilla on the skillet and cook for about 30 seconds to 1 minute, until it starts to blister and turn brown in patches. Flip, and cook on the other side. Wrap in a clean napkin or dry dish towel and proceed with the rest of the tortillas. These do not keep well, probably because they do not contain 14 ingredients, most of them unpronounceable, so eat them as soon as possible.
Makes 12 tortillas
CORN TORTILLAS
Thin, leathery store-bought corn tortillas make the best quesadillas. In my experience you can’t make good quesadillas with homemade corn tortillas—they’re too thick and soft. However, they’re deeply satisfying eaten all on their own, earthy and grainy, and they make the ideal starchy accompaniment to chili, carnitas, and posole.
Make it or buy it? Depends on what you’re using the tortillas for.
Hassle: No big deal
Cost comparison: Homemade tortillas cost about $0.05 per ounce. Store-bought: between $0.06 and $0.22 per ounce.
2 cups masa harina
1¼ cups warm water
1. In a bowl, stir together the masa and water. Shape into rounds the size of golf balls.
2. If you have a tortilla press—cheap and often sold at Mexican markets—sandwich the ball between two pieces of plastic wrap, place in the press, and press down hard. (If you have sandwich bags, they work even better than plastic wrap.) Peel back the wrap and put the flattened tortilla on the counter while you finish pressing the rest. (If you don’t have a tortilla press, pat the dough out as flat as you can between your palms, going back and forth, hand to hand. My maternal grandmother, who is Guatemalan, says this is the only proper way to make tortillas—which may be why, in 45 years, I have seen her make tortillas only once. It is definitely harder this way.)
3. Heat a skillet as hot as you can get it. Three at a time, cook the tortillas until they’re starting to blister and color, about 3 minutes. Flip, and continue cooking on the other side. Eat while they’re still warm.
Makes 10 tortillas
KIMCHI
Kimchi is a pungent, garlicky fermented pickle, typically made with cabbage, that is served at most Korean meals, including, I have read, breakfast. Supposedly, there are as many recipes for kimchi as there are Korean cooks and I once found a recipe that calls for a “small octopus.”
I first tasted a kimchi quesadilla from a Kogi truck in Los Angeles, one of the locally beloved armada of vehicles that sell Mexican-Korean fast food—kalbi burritos, tofu tacos, kimchi quesadillas—to Angelenos willing to wait in line forty-five minutes for their fix. The kimchi quesadilla satisfied a craving I’d never even known I had—for capsicum, sour cabbage, strarch, and rich oozing cheese, all together.
To make a kimchi quesadilla you need to ferment some kimchi, as home-fermented kimchi puts the store-bought products I’ve tasted to shame. There’s a bit of a fermentation revival happening in the United States now, inspired largely by a delightful and idiosyncratic book called Wild Fermentation by Sandor Ellix Katz. Katz has fermented almost everything, including a goat: “As it cooked, an overwhelming odor enveloped the kitchen. It smelled like a very strong cheese suited to only the bravest gastronome. There was some swooning and near fainting, and several folks were nauseated and had to leave the room.”
Start with kimchi.
Make it or buy it? Make it.
Hassle: Involves a little engineering
Cost comparison: To make a quart of kimchi costs just over $2.00. A quart of supermarket kimchi costs at least $10.00.
1 small head cabbage finely shredded, about 1½ pounds before trimming
1 tablespoon fine sea salt
2 teaspoons fish sauce
¼ cup whey from making yogurt, optional
4 red radishes, trimmed and quartered
3 scallions, chopped
5 garlic cloves,