- News
- Recipes
- Chocolate
- Columns
- Meet the Team
- Editor’s Corner
- A Bite of Britain
- A Southern Table
- California Love
- Cooking Croatia
- Cooking the Magazines
- Cooking with Roses
- Cocina Latina
- Deliciously Greek
- Deutschlicious
- Dining Down Under
- Eating South Africa
- From a Vermont Kitchen
- From Bacon with Love
- Mexico on My Plate
- Pig of the Week
- Savoring Seoul
- School of Tapas
- Sense Memory
- The Gastro Man
- The Healthy Dinner Table
- The Intrepid Eater
- Culinary Travel
- Drinks
- Stories
- Testing
- Video
Socialize
Hopi Blue Corn Tortillas
These colorful flat breads are sophisticated enough to add a lovely, warm edge to whatever it is that they are carrying, sweet or savory.
Text And Photo By Meagan Micozzi
Text And Photo By Meagan Micozzi
Some recipes, and even some ingredients, are lost but not forgotten.
Since moving to Arizona, I have often wondered why blue corn is so underutilized in culinary culture. Even here in the southwest, blue corn is almost always drowned out by the ubiquitous presence of yellow and white corns.
And then, just the other day, in the midst of my regular trawl of local cooking records and journals, I found a discussion of the significance of blue corn to the Hopi people.
Dumplings, drinks, and traditional paper-thin piki bread: the Hopi were at the forefront of harnessing, and appreciating, the unique, nutty flavor of blue corn.
Homemade, hand-made corn tortillas are another lost art (and science). Lost to gordo-sized stacks of plastic-wrapped, flavor vacuums masquerading as tortillas.
I decided to conduct a double-revival of sorts, and wrote this recipe for blue corn tortillas.
These simple flat breads are sophisticated enough to add a lovely, warm edge to whatever it is that they are carrying, sweet or savory.
Try a blue corn tortilla today to wrap up your next meal.
| Hopi Blue Corn Tortillas |
|
Recipe type: Baking
Author:
Homemade Blue Corn Tortillas
Ingredients
- 1 1/2 c. (255.5 kg) blue cornmeal
- 2 c. (473 ml.) water, boiling
- 3/4 c. (74.5 g.) all-purpose flour, plus more for dusting
- 1/2 tsp. (1.5 g.) white pepper, ground
- 1/2 tsp. (1.5 g.)nutmeg, ground
- cooking spray
Instructions
- In a medium bowl, sift the flour, nutmeg and white pepper together. Set the mixture aside.
- In a large bowl, pour the boiling water over the cornmeal and stir to mix. Allow the cornmeal to rest and cool for 5 minutes.
- After 5 minutes, use well-floured hands to work the sifted flour mixture in to the cornmeal. Once the flour is fully incorporated, remove the dough to a well-floured work surface.
- Please note that this dough is very sticky – you will need to replenish the flour on your work surface and hands regularly as you handle it.
- Knead the dough for 1-2 minutes, replenishing the flour on your hands and work surface as needed and noted above.
- Pinch off 8 balls of dough and sprinkle the top of each with flour.
- Meanwhile, heat a griddle over medium-high heat. Once the griddle is hot and, again, using well-floured hands, pat one dough ball into a 3” patty. Place the patty on the griddle, grease the back of a spatula liberally and immediately use it to flatten the tortilla. You will want to press outwards from the center of the tortilla, quickly spreading it out to double its original 3” size. Toast the tortilla for at least 2 minutes on either side. The tortilla is done when dark brown spots begin to appear on its surface. These tortillas are best enjoyed right off the griddle, but you may store them in an air-tight container and reheat for later usage.
Serving size: 8- 6” tortillas
WordPress Recipe Plugin and Microformatting by EasyRecipe
11 Responses to Hopi Blue Corn Tortillas
Leave a Reply
Emily @ Life on Food
May 23, 2011 at 7:24 pm
I love blue corn chips. They are always thicker and have a much more interesting texture. I have NEVER seen blue cornmeal in the store though. Is it something more common in the southwest or is it still hard to find there.
Meagan @ Scarletta Bakes
May 24, 2011 at 11:08 am
Emily, I agree that blue corn meal is a much more challenging market find, however, I have regularly been able to find an organic version of blue corn meal in health and whole foods stores such as Whole Foods which, of course, is a national chain. I believe the brand is Arrowhead Mills. I hope this helps!
Happy When Not Hungry
May 23, 2011 at 9:05 pm
These tortillas look beautiful! Love this recipe.
Felice - All That's Left Are The Crumbs
May 23, 2011 at 9:21 pm
I definitely think that tortillas, and even bread itself, is becoming a lost art. Thanks for featuring this today and reminding us to go out and get our hands dirty with flour. The blue cornmeal is a nice touch to home-made tortillas and I imagine that the flavor is so much better than any commercially produced one.
Sandra's Easy Cooking
May 24, 2011 at 12:52 am
Oh wow, these look amazing! Love the color of those tortillas..Thank you so much for sharing this wonderful recipe, and mouthwatering pictures!
Tamara
May 24, 2011 at 7:01 am
I’ve never heard of this blue variations, looks really interesting!
Erin @ Dinners, Dishes and Desserts
May 24, 2011 at 8:54 pm
Homemade tortillas, I don’t think you can go wrong. They look great!
Cher
November 13, 2011 at 12:27 pm
These are absolutely beautiful, the color making them a true work of art!
Billy Shears
November 16, 2011 at 11:07 pm
1 1/2 c. (255.5 —kg—-) blue cornmeal
~~thats alot of blue cornmeal!!
1 1/2 Cups –> 255.5 g?
Thanks for your recipe anyways, I wasn’t keen on putting ‘ash’ in with my cornmeal, as is tradition…. (so i read)
Billy Shears
November 16, 2011 at 11:09 pm
i forgot to rate your recipe~!!
__rating: good
there.
Pam
January 15, 2012 at 7:34 pm
During a trip to the southwest, I admired the blue Hopi corn that some of the national parks were growing as heritage displays. I thought the little plant would be great for the garden, so I ordered some seeds online from a specialty seed company and grew blue Hopi corn in the garden this summer.
Turns out the corn grows very small in the southwest because it is….a desert. Here in my midwest garden the corn grew 7 feet tall and I was blessed with huge ears of corn. I left it to dry on the stalks, until the squirrels discovered it, then I moved it inside to finish drying. A few thumb blisters later, the kernels were liberated from the ears. A half-hour and several hundred revolutions of my hand-crank grain mill later, I had 1 1/2 c of fine blue corn meal.
The recipe as-is didn’t work out too well, unless it was intended to add another cup and a half of flour to make the dough workable. I couldn’t master the mash-on-the-pan technique, so I had to roll out the dough and it was very floury. The texture was perfect, and because of this, I will give the recipe another try, next time adding only 1.5 cups of boiling water, and also adding 1/2t salt.
Thank you for the recipe so I could use my blue Hopi corn! Freshly milled grains are so great to use, I could see the natural oils coming out of the corn as the tortillas cooked.