So. One of the things I’ve been doing lately is getting ambitious with food, because. . .it is summer, or feels like it, and I am craving more foods that are hard to get here in Korea. So, I’m experimenting with making my own. Not that this is anything close to authentic Mexican, but it’s the closest I could do with what I had in my kitchen, and what was available in the country. (Also, I have the week off work, and if I am going to do things to occupy myself, I prefer Projects That I Can Eat Later to most other kinds.)

This evening, I made these. Chicken tacos, with homemade tortillas.

Luckily, I also photographed the process step by step, so I could show you how I did it! Everything is behind the jump.

Step one: Get someone to mail you some cumin.
No, seriously. I had a devil of a time trying to find it in Ansan, outside of Seoul – I would guess that you can get it in the foreign food markets, somewhere, but I. . .don’t know where.

Step two: Tortillas.
Note: These are the closest things to tortillas I found after a brief internet search, that I felt would be doable with my degree of ambition and what I had on hand. They don’t taste like tortillas from the store in Canada – probably because they’re made with different ingredients and thicker than those ones. They’re probably closest to very thin naan bread (that bread you get in Indian restaurants), which is still pretty damn delicious – and closer to tortillas than white bread, which is the next best option.

Gather one (1) bowl, two (2) cups of flour, a half-ish (1/2-ish) teaspoon of baking powder and a half-ish (1/2-ish) teaspoon of salt. Mix them together with something approximating a quarter (1/4) cup of butter. (One stick of Seoul-brand butter is, I believe, a third of a cup. I cut about a third off of one stick, and chucked that in.)

Mix everything until it’s a coarse, cornmeal-like texture. The recipe I used recommended using a food processor for this. I don’t own a food processor, so I used my hands – just stick your hands in, and grab for lumps of butter. When you find one, squish it into a smaller lump with some flour, until all the grabbable lumps are gone. You’ll get something that looks sort of like this, which is right:

Add 3/4 of a cup of warm water to hold everything together. Mix, and turn out onto a floured cutting board. It’ll look like this.

Now, knead. I found my dough was very sticky, so I had to constantly reflour the board and my hands – meaning I probably added a lot of flour to the dough as I kneaded. This is okay. In the end, it should look like this.

Divide the dough into 8 (or 10, if you like little tortillas) golf-ball-sized balls. Cover them with something plasticky (I used a clean sandwich bag, the recipe recommended plastic wrap) and let them rest for 15 minutes.

Turn on the stove. For this, I used a trusty little non-stick Tefal pan about the size of a small dinner plate/large salad plate. You want the pan to be pretty hot – these bad boys shouldn’t take more than two minutes each to cook. That said, don’t grease the pan – I tried about half with oil and half without, and I found that the non-oiled ones tasted better. Also, you’re less likely to take your eye out with hot oil that way.

While the pan is heating, flatten the balls into tortilla shapes – I found the easiest way to do this was to flatten them with my hands as much as possible on a floured cutting board, flip them, flip them again (so both sides are floured), and roll out as thinly as I could using a round chopstick as a rolling pin. The tortillas were roughly the size of my pan.

When you put your tortilla in, after about 15 seconds or so, it should have bubbles:

Flip it. Brown the other side, which will take about a minute, minute and a half. You can squish them down with your spatula, if that satisfying sizzle makes you feel like you’re Actively Cooking more.

Take the tortilla off the heat and put it on a plate. Repeat for the rest. They will be hot and delicious.

Step 3: Chicken Tacos
The recipe here is absolutely fantastic. I used chicken breast, because they don’t sell chicken thighs in grocery stores here – it needs to simmer longer than thigh, because it doesn’t shred as readily. Also, I forgot to buy decided not to use tomato paste.

Also also, I use real garlic, because you have to buy it in ludicrous quantities here if you want it on hand at all – any excuse to get rid of some, I take.

Step 4: Devour the Fruits of Your Labour
This is my favourite.