I bought this Atol Shuco kit just as an experiment. It’s a Salvadorean (and Guatemalan?) traditional food. Basically, you cook the corn flour and the powdered alguashte beans separately in water, then stir them together.

I don’t mean to denigrate anyone’s native foods, and perhaps my palate isn’t subtle enough to appreciate it, but this was horrible. Imagine tasteless hot flour soup.

But there was purple corn flour, so an obvious re-purposing was tortillas.

I stirred the two powders together with 1 C. of masa harina to make it up to 3 cups:

Add enough water to make a fairly soft, but not sticky, dough. No matter what you might read on the Internet, DO NOT ADD FAT OR OIL.

Roll the dough into balls. Now you can either pat them flat with your hands, or roll them out with a rolling pin, but I got to use my toy:

Place some plastic wrap on the opened surfaces, then add the ball of dough:

Squish:

Ett viola!

Peel it carefully from the plastic wrap and cook on a pre-heated (preferably non-stick) surface. NO OIL!!!

Cook on medium-high heat for 2-3 minutes, then flip and cook for another 1-2 minutes. Just like chapattis, they should be cooked through, with maybe a few scorch marks:

From 3 C. flour, you should get about 15 tortillas, depending of course on the size.

As they just come off the griddle, give them a sniff (don’t burn your nose!) The corny aroma is delicious.

I don’t think these are any better than yer basic tortillas, but they are a bit prettier!

Yum!

-R