Flour Tortillas

An updated recipe for perfect flour tortillas (plus a sourdough option)

Nov 12, 2024

Hey, everyone!

Today I’m sharing an updated version of a flour tortilla recipe I published a couple of years ago. Consider this the new and improved version after a number of trials and experiments.

I love flour tortillas because they’re such an approachable introduction to making bread at home. They’re quite easy, and you don’t have to worry about working with yeast, fermentation, rising times, etc. With that said, here’s a few things to consider:

The Fat

You can make flour tortillas with pretty much any type of oil, though solid fats (animal fats, butter, even coconut oil) work better from a texture perspective. These days I almost always make them with beef tallow.

Lard (aka pork fat) is traditionally used and is delicious. Duck fat works great as well. I like beef tallow because it creates a really rich, delicious flavor (without being beefy) and because it’s the healthiest animal fat available.

Side note— for years I’ve been hoping a company would enter the market with a true premium beef tallow. There are so many olive oil brands with impeccable sourcing and great branding, but the beef tallow market only has a few widely-available grass-fed brands. My friend Anthony Gustin recently did just that with his brand Lineage’s new beef tallow. It’s 100% grass-fed and grass-finished, regeneratively sourced, and tested for glyphosate and contaminants. I have no affiliate deal here— I just think it’s a great product that I highly recommend.

The Flour

You can make flour tortillas with regular all-purpose flour, and that tends to work great. But one thing I’ve learned in my bread-baking journey is the power of heirloom grains. These are grains that are specifically bred for certain use cases and, even more importantly, for flavor. Most grocery store flour is sourced from industrial wheat farms where the crop is bred to produce the highest yield. It’s incredible how much more flavorful the heirloom varietals taste.

The best flour for tortillas, by far, is Sonora flour. It’s a soft white wheat, making it ideal for tortillas, and the flavor is incomparable. Barton Springs Mill in Austin (which I’ve personally visited) makes a phenomenal organic Sonora flour. I also like Grist & Toll and Hayden Mills.

Resting The Dough

There’s a small change I’ve made to my flour tortilla technique since I last published this recipe, but it’s one that I’ve come to consider indispensable: properly resting the dough.

When you work with bread dough, allowing it time to rest after it’s been manipulated helps the gluten to relax, which improves texture and makes the dough much easier to work with. I’ve always rested the dough after I roll it into a ball, but I’ve found that giving it an additional rest after you’ve rolled it into individual tortilla balls also helps a ton. It will roll out much more easily into a perfect circle, and the final texture will be better.

Sourdough Tortillas

At the end of this post, I’ve included additional details for how to make a sourdough version of flour tortillas. If you have a sourdough starter, this is a must-try. I promise you that sourdough beef tallow flour tortillas made with heirloom Sonora flour are the best tortillas you will ever have in your life, full stop. Shoutout to Chad Robertson and Jennifer Latham for introducing me to this technique in Bread Book.

Ingredients

2 cups (250g) Sonora or all-purpose flour
1/4 - 1/3 cup (~60g) beef tallow
salt
water

Process

Start by adding your flour to a bowl and mixing in a big pinch of salt.

Mix the dry ingredients to incorporate.

Add in 1/4 - 1/3 cup tallow — it should be at room temperature or slightly melted, but not liquid. You just want it pliable enough to be able to work it into the flour.

Using your fingers, press the flour and fat together to incorporate. You want a mealy texture like the photo below. Mix it together until the fat is evenly distributed throughout the flour.

Next, you want to pour in and incorporate your water.

Start with 1/2 cup (118g) room temperature water, and add more as needed. Different flour types will hydrate differently, so just add it a bit at a time until you get the consistency you want.

Using your hands, slowly mix the flour with the water until it is just incorporated enough to hold the dough together (like the photo below).

Once the dough is incorporated, move it to a lightly floured work surface.

Being careful not to overwork it, knead the dough until it comes together and is smooth, elastic, and pliable. The dough should have a smooth surface and just a little bit of "bounce" when you press it with your fingers.

Once you get there, cover the dough with a slightly damp paper towel and let it rest for 20 minutes.

After the dough has rested, start by pinching off a piece about the size of a golf ball.

Using the wood surface, roll that into a tight and smooth ball. Repeat that with the rest of the dough. Then cover the dough balls with a paper towel and rest again for 20 minutes.

Once the second rest is complete, place a dough ball on a lightly floured surface and press it flat. Turn it over to get a bit of flour on both sides.

Using a rolling pin (or a wine bottle, if you don't have one), roll the dough ball into a large, flat circle.

I personally like to roll these quite thin, so they’ll come out light and chewy.

Pre-heat a dry cast iron skillet over medium to medium-high heat.

Cook the tortillas for 30 seconds - 1 minute on the first side, turning the tortilla as it cooks.

Once it starts to bubble up, flip it and cook on the other side for another minute or so.

You want the tortilla bubbled up and cooked through, with light spots of browning. Once both sides look like that, the tortilla is ready to eat.

Serve these immediately, as they're best eaten piping hot.

That said, you can also make these ahead of time, store them wrapped in the refrigerator, and reheat them in a dry skillet. You can also make the dough ahead of time and store it for a few days in the fridge or a few months in the freezer.

Enjoy!

Sourdough Version

You can make a sourdough version of these tortillas quite easily. The best part is that you can use the discard from your sourdough starter, since you don’t need it to be risen to provide leavening.

This is one of the easiest sourdough recipes I’ve made, and the tortillas are incredible.

Ingredients

35g sourdough starter discard
125g cold water
7g salt
250g flour
60g beef tallow (at room temp)

Process

In one bowl, mix together your starter and water. Use your hand to stir everything together.

In another bowl, combine your salt and flour. Add in the beef tallow, breaking it up into pieces. Using your fingers, press the flour and fat together to incorporate. You want a mealy texture.

Mix it together until the fat is evenly distributed throughout the flour.

Pour your wet ingredients into your dry ingredients and start to mix them together with your hands until it forms a shaggy dough. Then, start kneading it until a smooth dough forms. You want a dough that's smooth, elastic, and has incorporated all the hydration.

Take the dough, wrap it in plastic wrap, and put it in the fridge for 24 hours— this is crucial fermentation time. The bacteria and yeast in the starter will get to work on the flour, making it more delicious and digestible.