Today begins the first installment of Cooking With Bwog, dedicated to providing quality, cheap, healthy, and easy recipes to make your meal-plan-free life as tasty as possible. If you have any amazing cooking secrets you’d like to share or questions for the Bwog Culinary Team, please email bwgossip@columbia.edu. This week’s feature is  corn tortillas.

Cooking time: 30 seconds per tortilla

Ingredient: Masa, a dried corn dough mix that is not corn meal. Bwog uses Masarica by Goya. Los Vecinos Supermarket on 108th and Amsterdam sells masa, but you can also find it at most grocery stores in the neighborhood.

Cost for Ingredients: 1 bag of corn flour is $4 (makes 300 tortillas)

Utensils necessary: A stove, a frying pan or piece of metal, a bowl, a plastic bag and some scissors. You might also want a spatula if you unless you don’t mind burnt fingers.

Instructions for making around 20 tortillas after the jump:

 

1. First, turn the stove on medium heat and put the pan or metal over it. Do not grease the pan. Then mix around 1 cup of masa flour in a bowl with 1 cup of water. The mix should form into a ball but be fairly dry and pebbly. It’s really hard to form the tortillas if the flour is too moist, so if you have trouble forming the tortillas, add flour until it’s easy. 

2. To form the tortillas, first cut a circular piece of plastic out of the plastic bag. This will be your tortilla mold, and should be about the size of the human hand (10cm diameter).

3. Roll a golf-ball-sized ball of dough and place it in the center of your mold. Squish it flat with your hand. Then, using the fingers of one hand, push the dough out towards the edges of the mold while using your other hand to rotate the piece of plastic. The tortilla should be even and about 2 mm thick. 

4. Pick up the tortilla, which should still be stuck to the plastic, and place it (with the plastic up, of course) on the hot pan. Peal the plastic off of the tortilla without ripping it. The tortilla needs around 15-20 seconds to cook on each side, or until it is sturdy and begins to brown. While it’s cooking you can form the next tortilla. When they’re done, put them in a contained space, such as under a cloth, so that they stay warm.

Serving ideas: with cheese, honey, nutella, salsa, beans, rice, salad, soup.