Food Preserving

I like the flatbreads I make which we call, rightly or wrongly, tortillas. They started out being a homemade substitute for the commercial ones you buy at the supermarket which we used when having a Mexican style dinner. I home made them so I knew what went into them (no additives), to reduce our waste due to packaging on the commercial ones and because ours were cheaper.

I’ve being doing it for a few years now, but it has only been since last July (2018) that I have been making them a couple of times a week as a more generalised homemade loaf style bread substitute as well. I started up doing this during no-buy July and liked them so much I’ve kept it up ever since. They are also fairly quick to make so if caught without bread, I can throw them together in half an hour and away we go! They are a great feed.

But, you know though, you can always improve things!

I’ve also been fooling around with drying leaf crops and using the resulting leaf powder in foods we make at home. There are three reasons I added it in to the homemade tortillas as an experiment –

1. It turns them GREEN!!!!! – this was a lot of fun, adding some variety to what we eat.
2. it added extra nutrition in the form of vitamins and minerals,
3. It replaced some of the bought-in flour that we use with something we can home produce for nothing.

The recipe I use is –

Wholemeal flour  1 cup
Bakers flour   ¾ cup
Dried leaf powder  ¼ cup
Salt    ¾ TSP
Olive oil   3 Tbsp
Water (warm)   2/3 cup

The Process

I mix the flours, leaf powder, oil and salt in a bowl and then slowly add the water while mixing it in with my fingers. I keep adding the water and mixing until it comes together into a dough, then I turn it out and knead it for a couple of minutes. I put back into the bowl and let the dough rest for 20 minutes then cut the dough into 4 quarters and form the dough into balls. Using an elliptical rolling pin on a round wooden board (with a line cut into it about the size of a finished tortilla - 24cm) and roll out each ball into a thin disc. I Place each tortilla into a (very) lightly oiled pan on medium heat and let it cook until bubbles form, for me this was a couple of minutes, then turn over and cook on the other side. They are best when consumed immediately but can be stored in an airtight container for a couple of days.

So, how did it go?

Compared to the normal ‘no leaf’ tortillas they were very similar with only minor differences –

1. Flavour – when eaten by themselves with no spread or fillings there was a very mild (in this case) beet-like flavour, which all but disappeared when the tortillas were eaten with a filling.
2. Texture – Again, very similar, although perhaps a little drier and less flexible, but hardly discernible.
3. Colour – They were GREEN!!!! A very dark green, darker than commercially available green tortillas. It seems to me that you could reduce the amount of leaf powder in the mix to a half or less than in the recipe I made and get a somewhat lighter green tortilla similar to the commercial ones, if that is what you are looking for.

Overall it was an interesting experiment and I will be making green tortillas on a regular basis.