My hope that good flour tortillas might be on the upswing was buoyed by last week's find of decent, not-awful flour tortillas in a non-Latino grocery store.
Unfortunately, they were dashed this week. I bought a pack of Mama's Tortillas at the grocery store (Stater Bros. this time, I think) from one of those fancy aisle-end standalone stands next to the eggs. I should've known they would be weird, because tortillas only come in packs of 8 when they're a) targeted toward pasty white people like me, and b) bad with fancy labels.
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But never mind, I pressed on, looking for the perfect wrap for my 5 Bar Beef carne asada. The tortillas were three times as thick as other tortillas–honestly, they were like little flour gorditas–and they puffed appealingly on the comal.
But that's where the positives end. They had the usual list of preservatives, but for some reason, they tasted weirdly, intensely buttery, like a Chinese bao bun slathered with the proceeds from the pump machine at a movie theatre snack bar. They took so long to heat through that they carbonized on the outside before the milky fresh quesillo I brought back from Tijuana melted in my sincronizada.
It took a lot of exertion to rip them apart with my teeth, which meant that the dreaded taco affliction known as falla estructural–structural failure–spilled the contents all over my freshly laundered shirt.
Back to the drawing board, Mama's, but take comfort in knowing that no matter how strange your tortillas are, they're still better than Mission brand.
Grade: D.
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