Flour Tortillas

One of the things I made over the weekend (or tried to make, in this case) was a fritatta. I've made several, but this time I tried to do it without a recipe. The result was, well, scrambled eggs with sausage and potato. When I tasted it, it said "breakfast burrito!" (It really did. I heard it distinctly.) But, I had no tortillas.

But, an idea formed, and tonight I put it into action. Using this recipe, I made my own flour tortillas tonight. It seemed audacious when I thought of it, but it was mostly pretty easy.

Here is the dough - flour, lard, salt, water - at rest.

And here are the cooked tortillas. "Round" is such an arbitrary concept, don't you think?

The unroundness is related to the bit of trouble I did have. I found it difficult to roll out nice-looking rounds, and I also had trouble laying them nicely in the pan. I suspect both these things are matters of practice.

And practice I will. Although the difference is not huge, I did find my tortillas to be tastier than store-bought. (And, of course, I'm thinking about flavor that could be added to the dough. A little cumin, perhaps? Lemon zest?)

I also found mine to be stiffer than what I'm used to from the store: they will work just fine for a soft-taco approach, but I don't think I could wrap a burrito.  But their small size (about 7" in diameter) is probably too small for that anyway. (Can a shapeless blob have a diameter?)  I could make the dough balls bigger, but that would also increase the difficulty with managing them.

Tomorrow morning, I will have a breakfast burrito with egg, potato, and my own breakfast sausage. Yum.

UPDATE: I found this morning that, having fully cooled, the tortillas were much softer than when first out of the pan. I don't quite understand this, but I'll certainly go with it!