I went shopping! the goal was to make four different types of taquitos to explore different tastes and textures. Knowing I would not make enough taquitos to feed the house I also made extra filling of each to serve as the base for tacos that would be topped with salsa fresca, shredded lettuce, carrot and radish.
The potato taquitos were made with this turkish spice that I really like which is predominantly paprika but I have yet to ask Justin what it is. I supplemented with salt pepper tumeric curry spice and cumin to round out the flavor. Season to taste! always season ti to the way you want ti to taste so you can enjoy it, this includes compensating for how the flavor changes as it cooks, in particular spicyness will decrease a bit and herbyness will increase. If you are cooking for other people (say someone who hates spice) you can either laugh at them as they bite into your taquito or you can take the time to set aside some potatoes and spice it with hem in mind. Toss them in olive oil and bake at 400 for about an hour.
Chiplotle tofu seemed like a must. . .well chipotle something at least. I crumbled the tofu and tossed it with chipotle, paprika garlic powder, spike(my favorite powdered vegetable bullion) , pepper and olive oil. Before baking I let it sit for about 30 minutes so the flavor could soak in. I just threw it in the oven with the potatoes and took it out 25 minutes later. it was brown and crispy and spicy! I could have done a bit more to make it saucy but it worked. I think next time I will make a chipotle sauce to mix it with after baking. This would also help in the taquito rolling phase since the sauce (I am imagining a pretty thick sauce) would hold things in place better.
Sweet potatoes get cubed and steamed. Just 15 minutes in steam is enough to make these sweet tubers mashable. I mixed in a bit of salt and olive oil but wanted to let the sweetness really shine so I stayed away from my typical arsenal of savory spices.
not pictures here is the garlic black beans which I made. . . not sure where those pictures ended up but I did have some problem with my camera earlier in the week. We will just have to do black beans another time and shift our focus to the tortillas which are made form scratch.
Buy a masa mix. It is a medium ground corn meal with lime. the acidity helps bring out the starchyness of corn so it makes for good tortillas (at least that is what I was told once and it sound good enough to propagate whether it is totally factual or not). Knead together 2 cups of masa with 1 cup water and a pinch of salt and you are already half way to making tortillas.
I am lucky enough to have a tortilla press in my house so I dont need to roll out the dough and then get something round to cut out the shape I want. I take a small lime sized piece of dough (golf ball sized for sporty people) and press it, using an old plastic bag as my make-shift wax paper to assist removal from the tortilla press.
We have our 4 fillings to work with (with a close up of the beans since there are not enough gratuitous black bean pictures yet) and each tortilla gets about 1.5 Tbs of filling and rolled into the approximate shape of a taquito. (yes the tortillas below are store bought, the home made were saved for the tacos)
The biggest problem I had was that the beans and tofu were not held together enough. Both potatoes did quite well and I think if I mashed the black beans a bit more it would have made the rolling a bit easier, still came out delicious! I brushed the tortillas with canola oil and then put them in the oven at 400 for around 45 minutes (the last 10 minutes were actually at 450 because I wanted my taquitos extra crispy)
To go with the taquitos, Guacamole of course. Avocado cut in half, pit removed and SMASHED into bowl.
mix in salt pepper some lime juice 5-60 cloves of garlic ( i used 5 cloves finely grated for 4 avocados worth) and you are done! I put in a spoon full of salsa fresca for color and flavor but you are getting dangerous with the purity of what is guacamole if you push that too far!
salsa fresca? diced tomatoes green onions and garlic. Toss ti with a healthy squeeze of lime juice an a hearty pinch of salt and pepper . . .done and done!
out of the oven I was so excited that I burned my mouth as I tried to eat one of the sweet potato taquitos right away ( did I mention this was the first time I made taquitos?). So let them cool but dont let them get cold, these baddies are best eaten hot and often! I am happy to say that none of the 30 taquitos I made were left at the end of dinner.
Taco Bar!
Taquito Bliss! served with a cabbage salad that Ashley made that has an amazing creamy tahini grapefruit vinaigrette to go with it.
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