Last night I tried to make homemade tortillas. Keyword is TRIED. Let’s start with the good. Or at least, the sorta good? The flavor wasn’t too bad. That’s it. It was pretty much a fail from the beginning. And guess what, I have photos for proof so we can go step by step and talk about what did not work for me. First off, I decided to use my sourdough to make these – okay shouldn’t be an issue. Well then I decided to make these gluten free. I think that’s where things went wrong.

As you can see from above, my dough (which I had already been pulling from) was not it. I used King Arthur’s measure for measure gluten free flour instead of the all purpose and adding in the xanthum gum myself. Could this have been part of the issue? Maybe. I did add extra liquid to help because the dough was dry.

Now it rolled out okay, but not anywhere close to what it should have looked like based on the videos I’ve seen of people making tortillas. I mean, I’ve made homemade corn tortillas before, and they worked better than this! These kept splitting and sticking, but again, they were not really “doughy” like they needed to be. But I was committed.

You know what they say—your first one always stinks. That was completely true with my first tortilla. One, I had way too much oil in my cast iron, which was completely my fault and would, of course, skew the results if I was compiling data.

So as we continued on, I tried to get my dough a little wetter so it would stick to itself more, which of course made it stickier. But the key for tortillas is to roll them thin so they bubble up when they cook. As you can see, I don’t know what a circle is (evident by my pizza making skills also haha). But also they are coming out stiff! Like I’m almost frying them, which I’m not because I made sure to get rid of the excess oil. I played around with the temperature of my cast iron, between hotter so it wasn’t on as long, to less hot so it would cook slower. Nothing was really working.

By the end of it, I was left with a pile of mediocre “tortillas.” I use the term lightly because I would, in no way, refer to them as tortillas in front of anyone. Except, of course, anyone reading this, because this is an educational opportunity.

Am I defeated? Maybe a little. But I will try again. And try a whole bunch of different things differently. If you think you can do better than me, here is the link to the recipe I used by milkandpop (sourdough discard tortillas).