After traveling to Mexico earlier this year and testing their flour against American flour I could find in my local grocer, I discovered how much better Mexican flour was when making tortillas. Since I'm back in Amsterdam, thousands of miles from home, I wanted to see if I could find an alternative to the great soft Sonoran flour I found while back home.
To experiment I bought 3 other types of Dutch flour from Ekoplaza and prepared tortillas using my standard tortilla recipe.
From left to right we have El Rosal Harina, Tarwebloem Luna e Terra, Ekoplaza Farina de ble, and the darker brown Tarwemeel
I also experimented with a new way of rolling tortillas. I usually use a cutting board and two pieces of baking paper to roll the tortillas in. This time I tried rolling it on one of those silicon cutting board mats.
For the most part this worked as I peeled it off the mat, until I reached the center where it started to rip and stick to the mat. Since I primarily use this mat for chopping vegetables/meat, it's filled with scores and cuts so I believe that ruined the non stick nature of this surface.
So I decided to try again, this time with a much bigger silicone mat which cost about $40.
At first I tried rolling it without baking paper on top of the tortilla, but I found that the mat was so non stick that the tortilla would sometimes come up from the mat ruining it's shape as you see on the left.
When putting the paper on top, the tortilla was much easier to shape into a circle, and it easily peeled off the surface to place into my pan. This is now my new method for rolling tortillas until I can get a heated press that unfortunately doesn't seem to exist in the Netherlands.
On to the tortilla experiment!
With each type of flour, I made half batches using 63g of flour, 18g of lard, and 40g of water. The textures when first kneading were quite interesting, the two Dutch farina de ble flours were more on the wet/sticky end and quite elastic right out the gate. The Tarwemeel wasn't as fine and as expected it needed more water than the others due to the flour being less soft. Lastly, the Mexican flour needed just a little more water to get to the usual soft clay consistency we look for.
Once I rolled the tortillas out, cooking everything felt quite similar, so no surprises here. Next I did a blind taste test to try to guess which tortilla tasted the best. Initially it was tough for me, one flour stood out but everything was too close to tell immediately for me. I had my girlfriend try them as well and she had created her list from 1–4. I did another taste test and created my list as well. So without further adieu here is how we ranked them!
It was really close between the Luna E Terra and El Rosal flours. But based on the taste tests the Luna E Terra came out slightly ahead. The textures were quite similar and the after taste wasn't as strong as other flours. The Tarwemeel (#4) had a distinct taste due to how it's produced, you could also see it in it's color (even though that didn't apply to the taste test). #3 Ekoplaza's Farine de ble was a soft flour with a bit of an after taste compared to its counterpart Luna E Terra, but it's hard to describe as to what that was exactly.
All of the tortillas were still quite delicious though, we ate them within 2 days, but I'm happiest with the Luna E Terra and El Rosal Harina. I'll definitely include them in future tests together. I think this aligns with my initial theory that compared to America, Europe produces nice breads, so I imagine their flour speaks to that and I think it's highly likely that an alternative exists that can be locally sourced here to be used for flour tortillas rather than fully relying on sourcing from Mexico.
