The Hardest Thing to Make

are tortillas. I think. Maybe a mole negro is very difficult and complex, and it takes a couple days to make it. But tortillas--hand-made corn tortillas--are the most difficult thing I've ever attempted to master in Mexican cuisine. I can't do it. I suppose if all I did was work on making tortillas for hours a day for a few months or years I would eventually get pretty good at it, but I'm trying to be realistic about my abilities when it comes to Mexican food, and my time when it comes to cooking it. Here's a short video that slow-mo's a woman making tortillas completely by hand:

Since I cannot do that, I cheat and use a tortillas press, which looks like this:

This contraption is composed of two hinged heavy cast iron plates that can be pressed together with the lever that folds over the top plate. Still, tortillas aren't easy to make using this machine. 

First you need masa harina, or corn flour. This is not the coarse corn flour one might use for cooking cornbread. Nor is it cornmeal that you might toss over your pizza stone before rolling out your pie dough. This is made for and used almost exclusively for Mexican food: tortillas and sopes and huaraches, or chalupas, etc. All of these latter are the same thing: thicker corn meal patties lightly fried and used as a surface for holding meat, beans, or veggies (or whatever else you plan to eat). They're not tortillas, although their composition is the same. When you make tortillas you need this masa harina and some water. Yeah, that's it. You mix the water and masa harina to make a dough. This dough should be thick enough to flatten out and to hold together. To be honest, I've never figured out any exact ratios of water to masa because I suck at making tortillas and usually opt for the store-bout Mission brand white corn tortillas instead. However, I will say that the best tortillas I've ever had were those I successfully made myself. That might have something to do with the fact that I was happy I made some half-decent tortillas, or it could be that homemade tortillas really are better than the store-bought kind.  I don't know. People talk about tortilla freshness, which I'm sure has something to do with why those homemade ones were so great. But, good lord it took forever.

The problem is that this dough is sticky. If you've worked with wheat flour dough and thought it was sticky you haven't worked with anything yet. Masa harina is so fine that, when mixed with water, it sticks to everything: your hands, the spoon, the bowl, the countertop, your wife, your cat. It's a big mess. I've never tried this, but I wonder if lard would help to keep the tortilla dough from being so sticky, kind of like you might use butter to make a pie crust. The problem, though, as I see it, would be that if you used too much lard or you'd get a greasy, almost-deep fried mess (basically, tortilla chips, instead of soft corn tortillas) when you try to cook them. You also use extra masa harina to keep the tortilla-ready dough from sticking to your work station or hands or the tortilla press. Unfortunately, this is not a science, so it doesn't always work as planned. I get extra masa harina stuck to the press, or to the wax paper that I stick between the press's plates in yet another attempt to keep the masa from sticking and not peeling way. Then I try to press the tortillas. I pull out a ball of dough about the size of a golf ball and place in in the center of the tortilla press's bottom plate. I flip the press closed, give it a shove with the lever, and when I pull it apart: the goddamn masa sticks to the fucking press and even if I try to spatula it off it tears to pieces. The one time I ended up successful at tortillas-making I spent an hour and half to get six decent corn tortillas for my wife and I. That's why I usually say fuck this shit and buy the bag of Mission tortillas, which retails for ~$2.50. 

So I've still got a giant ass bag of masa harina in my pantry, and a hardly-used tortilla press. I use the masa for sopes, which are amazingly easy to make when compared to tortillas, but that'll be, like, another chapter.