Good stuff, as I expected. I really cannot recommend this book highly enough, whatever your cookery expertise. With one exception, coming up—and a reminder that a few of the recipes at the back end of the book are more challenging or for more rarified palates. But if you’ve wanted to make your own tortillas and 2-3 really great taco fillings for carnivores, vegetarians and vegans, it’s a pretty damn great book. (I think you could even make the flour tortillas with vegetable shortening rather than pork lard…)
I made the garlicky sauce/marinade for the skirt steak first, on Saturday. Nothing complicated, but the orange juice and spice in it added something nice.
I also made margaritas with grapefruit juice, Meyer lemon, lime, and agave syrup (well and tequila, yes) while I was at it. Not in the book, but a well-practiced recipe nevertheless.
Then I made the flour tortillas in the usual way. I do love when I get to the point with a dough that I know the rough proportions by heart but I also know what the texture has to be for it be be “right”. Important especially when I’m cutting down an otherwise big recipe. The basic cooking procedure here really works beautifully—one shallow cast iron pan on low heat to get a given tortilla ready, one bigger cast-iron skillet on high heat to quickly blister both sides. It’s a bit tiring when I’m making 15-20 tortillas for a bigger service because you absolutely cannot walk away from it and you really can’t roll out too far in advance of the cook—it’s a classic assembly line thing. I am completely fine with my rather “rustic” results, e.g., some tortillas aren’t perfect circles. I am not a factory.
The salsa that the authors describe as one of their favorites is something I’ve made a few times before from the book, partly because they sell it so strongly. It’s essentially some very aromatic spices toasted with some small dried chiles that are supposed to be arbol (I used Calabrian chiles; I think you could also use dried Thai bird peppers). The major liquid in it, and a big source of flavor, is apple cider. It’s an odd salsa, I have to be honest. An acquired taste. It’s got a sour, strongly flavored taste to it. I would only use advisedly with tacos that were kind of made for it. I have to say that its fate every time I’ve made it is that I put it on a few things, nobody else does, and it stays in the fridge for a few weeks and gets tossed, because even I don’t make a huge dent in it. I find it really interesting and different but it has a funk that needs the right partners—it’s not for dipping chips.
The catfish worked fine for the tempura fish tacos. They’re otherwise what you’d expect to get at a food truck or nice strip mall joint in California—mayo, cabbage, cilantro, radishes, plus flour tortillas and crunchy fried fish.
I didn’t make the corn tortillas on Saturday—we had enough food. But I decided to tackle the chicken tortillas recipe on Sunday as our post-Eagles meal. (I have to say I felt sorry for the 49ers.)
Let me just say that this recipe ought to come with a bit of warning for any inexperienced chef, because it’s actually dangerous for the incautious. The recipe wants you to take very, very finely chopped raw chicken and combine it with masa harina, salt and water for a dough. Then you put the dough on your tortilla press and cook as if it’s a standard corn tortilla.
The problem with this is cross-contamination for the incautious chef. A dough with raw cornmeal or flour is in fact already a bit dangerous—people don’t think of raw flour (or cornmeal) as a food safety issue but you can get sick from it. But let us just say that if you add raw chicken to it, things just got serious. I was trained back in the day in my cooking job to treat raw meat as semi-radioactive. I was able to remember that the dough was effectively like a bowl full of ground chicken disguised in cornmeal, but it took a bit of internal narration to reinforce the point—most especially not to touch other things while working on it unless I washed my hands first. (I remembered before making another batch of margaritas, fortunately.)
The authors suggest serving the chicken tortillas with a dense mole sauce. I adapted that and decided to make a “tortilla lasagna” with cheese and a commercial red salsa that I really love. I frankly was a bit nervous about whether the standard cooking method was adequate for tortillas that had minced raw chicken throughout. That was pretty damn good. I’ll use them for quesadillas this week so that they get the same kind of additional heat on them before eating. Caution aside, they’re really good—significantly different in their taste than a standard freshly-made corn tortilla.
(I don’t know if the difference made it easier for me to make them, but the pressing went better this time, in any event.)
I'll put them on the list for when we can manage to get you over! They're good--interestingly filling, hearty compared to an ordinary corn tortilla--I see why the authors think of them just as something to cover with a bit of mole sauce.
Those chicken tortillas make me nervous but I am kind of interested in tasting them.