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In February of 2009, my husband and I bought our first home located on a few acres in Johnson, Vermont. We live here with our dog, Ollie, two cats: Elvis and Atticus, six Nigerian Dwarf goats: May, Chutney, Poppy, Juniper, Willow, and Jokers Wild, and about fifteen laying hens. And to top it all off we welcomed our daughter, Isabel, into the world on January 11th, 2011.

We're slowly updating our 1850's farmhouse while steadily working towards a healthy, meaningful, self-sufficient life together.

This blog details our endeavors along with our successes and failures- all in good fun. Thanks for stopping by, hope to see you again soon!

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Make your own wraps!

Lovingly Posted by Melissa Tuesday, March 2, 2010

Ok, time for part two of my Sunday Kitchen-Extravaganza!

I don't know about you, but Kyle and I really enjoy a good, wrapped sandwich.  Whether it be a burrito, curried fish and rice, or even some quesadillas, we really enjoy using wraps.  Ok, I know that traditionally with Mexican food we should be using corn tortillas, but I really like whole wheat, so thats what we use.  Anyways, so as I mentioned yesterday, these wraps are one of the two last bread products we still buy.  But as of yesterday we've stricken it from the grocery list.

Just a quick note that on Sunday I made wraps using KAF Unbleached All Purpose White flour, not whole wheat, just because that was the recipe I came across in my King Arthur Flour Bakers Companion book that I recently bought.  I'm going to try it out with some whole wheat flour next time, I'll let you know how it goes.

Ok, so here we go.  Start off with 1.25 cups of water on the stove and get it boiling.  Once its bubbling away pour it into two cups of your flour.  Mix it all together pretty well with a spoon and then set it aside, covered, for about half an hour (until it cools).

While that's sitting get the rest of your ingredients mixed together:
1 cup of flour
1/4 cup potato flour (or 1/2 cup potato flakes- which I happened to have in the back of the cupboard)
1 1/4 teaspoon salt
2 tablespoons oil (the recipe called for veggie oil, we only have EV olive oil at our house...tasted fine to me)

In a small bowl I mixed together 1 teaspoon of active dry yeast with about a quarter cup of warm water.  I let it sit for the thirty minutes while the water/flour mixture cooled.  The recipe actually called for instant yeast, in which case you can just mix it in with the potato flour, salt, etc, but I don't have instant yeast at the house so we use what we've got, right?

Ok, moving on.

Once the flour/water mixture is cool, add the rest of the ingredients to it, stirring it as well as you can, but trust me, you'll have to get in there with your hands to really get it all incorporated.  It'll seem a little hopeless at first, but you'll get there.  After kneading it for a few minutes, form it into a ball, cover it lightly and let it rise in a greased bowl for an hour.  Oh, and I guess its important to use as little flour as possible while kneading, KAF actually recommends using a little bit of oil to keep it from sticking to everything as opposed to flour.  But I didn't read that far ahead so I used flour (not alot, I'm a frugal lady), and trust me, they turned out just fine.

After the initial rising has finished, break the dough up into smaller pieces (I made them a little bigger than a golf ball, which yielded 12 smaller portions), and then let these rest, covered, for another 15-30 minutes.  This is when things start to get a little hectic.

Its hectic because these suckers only take 1-2 minutes per side to fry (over medium/medium-high heat), and this just happens to be the exact about of time it takes for me to roll them out.  I rolled them out to be pretty big, and really thin (we're talking about 9" in diameter and about 1/16" to 1/8" thick).  Once it is all rolled out, carefully pick it up by the edges and lay it down in a dry frying pan (no oil, no butter, nothing). 

Frying them is interesting in that huge bubbles form causing the wrap to balloon-up while you're trying to cook it.  Personally, I popped the bigger bubbles with the tine of a fork to try to get them to cook more evenly (if you go this route BE CAREFUL, hot steam escapes which continually singed my fingers if I wasn't careful).

After each one was done cooking I placed it on a wire rack, stacking them all up to keep them soft until they were all done.  I let them sit for an hour or two until I was ready to finish my day up by making some chicken/bean burritos.  Kyle and I each had two burritos (after baking all day I realized I hadn't had any lunch!) and decided that these home-made wraps were awesome!  After dinner we were left with eight wraps that I bagged and put in the fridge to eat for lunch the next couple of days.

And looky here: I found an online recipe at the King Arthur Flour website for this, so you can print out the recipe and try it yourself!  Let me know how it goes!

2 comments

  1. Glad to hear you liked the tortillas. I make a big batch and freeze some for later, works just great. Definitely give them a try with 50/50 white and wheat flour. Yum!
    MaryJane @ King Arthur Flour

     
  2. Jennifer Says:
  3. I make mine with a bakers white flour and olive oil. The recipe I have calls for *gasp* Lard! Olive oil works as a fine stand in. I did try it with wheat flour but I found it was much harder to roll out. I gave up with it (since I have a bad shoulder) and resigned myself to white tortillas. I usually make 2 batches which yield around 17 tortillas a batch.

    My mom has a good recipe for english muffin bread... I am not a huge fan of english muffins so I can't say wether it's any good. Want me to scrounge it up for you?