By Marianne Graff, December 21, 2025
Screenshot credit: Love Kari Cooking, Youtube
The tutorial (screenshot featured above) is a good one: https://youtube.com/shorts/a4q039Teom0?si=9bXl4GjRy8vTflXp
Tortillas to the Rescue!
Have you ever been low on cash, have no time to go to the store anyway, and need a quick meal for some hungry people? An easy solution is to whip up some corn tortillas and pair the with whatever you happen to have in the fridge – veggies, soup, rice and stew leftovers, stirfry, salad, scrambled eggs, mashed potatoes. I have even stuffed some tortillas full of homemade sauerkraut and tomato salsa for a spicy, crunchy, tangy snack. All you need is to have a bag of maseca (corn flour) on hand. It’s faster than cooking rice or pasta, in my experience.
Mexico is full of surprises. The food is one of the best surprises I have discovered. Tortillas are far easier to make than you might think, and much much MUCH tastier than store bought. Fresh is best. Here in Mexico where I live people buy tortillas fresh each day, and sometimes twice a day, before each meal, because they taste so much better when fresh, gobbled up when they are less than an hour old.
They are quick to make, made of only a few ingredients that are not hard to find and are cheap to buy, and taste delicious.
Everywhere in Mexico you will see roadside taco stands that are set up everyday. This is the only country I have lived in where the street food is actually healthy. They corn tortillas are made fresh in front of your eyes and the toppings are usually made fresh each day, and don’t use much oil. Nothing is deep fried. They use very little cheese compared to Tex Mex style food, and instead add flavour by adding salsas. Many restaurants and roadside stands offer more than one salsa, often up to 5, and every place has a plate of chopped cilantro and finely chopped onion.
Below is a nice tutorial on how to make the (120 degrees Fahrenheit at home. They are truly easy. They only need 3 ingredients: corn flour ( everyone here uses Maseca flour), salt and hot water . Some recommend adding a few tablespoons of flour to the maseca to make the tortillas softer and more flexible.
If you don’t have a tortilla press, you can use two plates. You can use parchment paper instead of plastic wrap if you like, but it really is necessary since they will stick to your plates or press otherwise.
I find if fascinating how the tortillas puff up when you cook them, just like pita bread.
These puffballs are often slit open while still hot and puffy, and stuffed with the same toppings you put on them if they are quesadillas. It makes a hand pocket to hold and is a little easier to eat this way.
These stuffed pockets are called ‘gorditas’.
The stacks of tortillas are always wrapped in clean tea towels to slow them from drying out and going stale. If you wrap them in plastic, the condensed water that collects makes the tortillas soggy and they fall apart.
Instead of cooking a huge amount at once, just keep the masa ( dough) wrapped in a ball wrapped in plastic wrap in the fridge. Cook it up as needed.
Do not add oil to your fry pan when you cook them. It isn’t necessary.
There is a big debate about whether corn is nutritious, but I think the best way to think of this is as a wrapper for healthy toppings. Anything could work in these tortillas. In Mexico they love steak and marinated pork roasted on a spit like shawarma, or scrambled eggs cooked with spicy tomatoes and chiles, but you can find many more toppings at most roadside stands that resemble stewed meat. Stewed organ meat like liver is very popular, and so is chicken mole.
The vegetarian toppings l like are:
- small cubes of boiled potatoes
- nopales, which are cactus leaves with the spines removed, sliced French julienned style. They remind me of julienned green beans. They are sometimes cooked for just a few minutes with chopped tomatoes, onion and jalapenos to soften the and remove any bitterness.
- fresh cheese called panela that is springy and salty like fresh feta cheese
They often use a cheese that is similar to mozzarellla to turn these into quesadillas. They never use cheddar – that’s Tex Mex style.
The best part in my opinion are the salsas. Mexicans don’t eat many veggies as side dishes, but the salsas are like a salad in sauce form. They are made of green tomatoes more often than red tomatoes, in my experience.
They add finely chopped onions, chopped fresh cilantro, different kinds of chilis and sometimes some vinegar. Some are purred and smooth and others are ‘crudo’ or chopped and left chunky.
I’ll do another post on salsa recipes you can easily make at home.
They do really nice things with onions in Mexico. They soak chopped onions in the juice from jalapeno jars, or simply in water that has a generous amount of either salt or sugar added, then drained off. This takes away the bitterness. Just a few wisps of red onions that have been softened and made milder (or spicier) this way add a huge punch to the tacos and quesadillas. They regularly use around 23 different chilis in Mexico, and changing the chili completely changes the flavour of the whole salsa. There is a whole world of chilis out there besides jalapenos my friends!
Enjoy!