Show Us Your Roll

I was making enchiladas and at the filling stage decided the filling was too good to be contained — pulled pork in a red guajillo sauce with a small amount of refried black beans and queso fresco. I almost rolled it into a burrito instead. I made the enchiladas anyway. Photo: the baking dish, 8 enchiladas in a line, dark red sauce over the top, cotija over that. But I also made one burrito with the same filling. Side-by-side comparison was interesting. The enchilada won — the sauce pooled around the rolled tortilla and saturated the outside as it baked. The burrito was correct and clean. The enchilada was more luxurious. Different dishes for different occasions.

Documentation of a first attempt at fresh corn tortillas, with the honest mistakes included. Attempt 1: too dry — cracked on the press, cracked on the comal. Looked like a failed attempt at pottery. Attempt 2: water added, still slightly too dry. Some cracking at the edges. Attempt 3: got the texture to soft clay. No cracking on the press. Placed on a too-cool comal — steamed rather than toasted. Attempt 4: hot comal. First tortilla that looked like a tortilla. The photo of attempt 4 is not impressive by any objective measure. But the smell of fresh masa on a hot comal is the reason people do this. Once you smell it, you understand what masa harina is trying to replicate.

For anyone who has been cooking from canned beans and wants to understand what they are missing, here is the full process with photos. Stage 1 (raw dried pinto beans): small, firm, fully dry. Colour: light tan. Stage 2 (soaked overnight): swollen to double size, skin slightly looser. Stage 3 (after one hour cooking): beginning to soften, broth still pale. Stage 4 (after two hours): the broth has darkened significantly. The first beans are beginning to split. Stage 5 (done): full softness, broth is dark and deeply flavoured. The smell at this stage is the best smell in my kitchen. The broth in stage 5 is the ingredient you are throwing away when you use canned beans.

I am a convert and I want to document the conversion. Forty years of cooking on non-stick pans. Good ones, replaced when they scratched, always adequate. Then I inherited a cast iron skillet from a relative and started using it out of curiosity. Three months later: the cast iron is the only pan I use for anything that involves direct browning. The carnitas crisp is better. The tortilla char is better. The potato crust is better. The egg situation is complicated (I am still learning the seasoning) but improving. Photos: carnitas in cast iron at the crisping stage (you can see the direct Maillard crust), vs my memory of the non-stick equivalent which had more of a sauté colour than a proper crust.

The tomato plants this year were more productive than I expected. Eleven kilos of ripe roma tomatoes, all ready within the same two-week window. Photo: the full harvest on the kitchen counter. It is a problem I am very happy to have. Plan so far: 3 kilos into fire-roasted red salsa for freezing. 2 kilos into a slow-cooked tomato passata. 2 kilos into a chile colorado braise base. 2 kilos into slow-roasted whole tomatoes (stored in olive oil). 2 kilos still unallocated. Suggestions welcome for the last 2 kilos. Bonus points if it involves dried chiles.

The tomatillos are producing well this year and I set up a backyard station for making salsa verde in volume. Photo documentation. Setup: outdoor gas burner, large comal, blender, sterilised jars. The workflow: tomatillos from the vine, straight to the comal for charring, into the blender with toasted serrano and charred onion, adjusted with salt and lime, into hot sterilised jars. I made 11 jars this weekend. They will last until spring. The photo of the row of jars with the dark green-grey colour of properly charred tomatillo salsa is the most satisfying thing I have made this year.

Side-by-side photo because I think the visual argument is more convincing than anything I can write. Left: supermarket flour tortilla, the most popular brand locally. Right: fresh flour tortilla made with good lard. The differences visible in the photo: the lard tortilla has slight layering at the edge, a visible variation in surface texture from the fat distribution, and a warmer colour from the fat content. The shop one is uniformly pale and smooth. In the fold test (which I also photographed): the lard tortilla folded without cracking; the shop one developed a small crack at the fold point. Bake a lard tortilla. Once.

Week eleven of my Sunday batch cooking. The system has stabilised and I wanted to document what it looks like now versus what it looked like in week one. Week one: 3 hours of chaotic cooking, two blowouts in the assembly, rice overcooked, forgot to keep the bean broth. Week eleven: 2 hours, everything parallel, zero blowouts, rice correct every time, bean broth reserved and refrigerated in a labelled jar. Photos: the current setup (labelled containers, resting jig for the finished burritos, the broth jar in the fridge). The difference between week one and week eleven is not skill — it is system. The same technique repeated weekly becomes automatic.

Full disclosure: the habanero hot sauce in this burrito was made with a 3:1 habanero to tomato ratio, which was ambitious. Photo: the cross-section. The sauce is visibly contained in a stripe — I used the wet ingredient discipline from this community's assembly threads and it worked. The burrito held. The seal was fine. The eating experience was extremely intense but controlled. The habanero sauce at that ratio has a fruitiness behind the heat that is genuinely beautiful if you can get past the heat level. Would I make it at that ratio again? Probably not for a weeknight. Yes for a deliberate occasion.

I documented the full carnitas process from start to finish with photos at the two-hour, four-hour, six-hour, and eight-hour marks. This was a 2.5kg shoulder cooked in lard at a low oven temperature. Two hours: the meat is beginning to colour but still intact. The fat is clarified. Four hours: the shoulder has slumped and the visible connective tissue is starting to melt. Six hours: you can see the muscle beginning to separate. The fat is darker. Eight hours: the meat pulls apart with a finger. The fat has reduced to about 60% of the original volume. Final crisp in a cast iron took 6 minutes. The result was the best carnitas I have made — yielding, slightly gelatinous at the edge pieces, consistent throughout.

I have been wanting to write this post for a while. Here is a detailed breakdown of my best burrito roll so far, with photos at each stage. Fill weight: 248g. Diameter at widest: 7.2cm. Length: 21cm. Seal method: three-point with a 45-second skillet hold. Fill distribution: rice as base layer across the full width, carnitas centred in a column, beans flanking the protein, avocado as the top layer placed last. Salsa in a controlled stripe across the centre of the protein. Cross-section after cutting: symmetric, clean edges, no leaking, avocado visible as a distinct layer at the top. This is what the numbers look like when everything is right. I have the photo if anyone wants the reference.

Documenting the difference. Before: burritos assembled by feel, no sense of why some held and others did not, fill weight guessed, sealing method informal, tortilla temperature ignored. After eight months: weigh everything, three-point seal, resting step, skillet temperature checked, bean broth kept and used. Blowout rate dropped from roughly 1 in 3 to almost zero. Photos: a burrito from my first month (you can see the structural issues), and one from last week (clean seal, correct geometry, cross-section shows even distribution). This community is a genuine resource. I would not have made the connection between fill weight and blowout probability on my own.

Six weeks of working on this. Six weeks of burritos that looked right until they hit the skillet and unrolled. I have been posting questions here and trying every suggestion. Today: three-point seal, skillet at proper temperature (finally invested in a cast iron thermometer), seam-side down for 45 seconds before moving. The seal held. Photo: cross section after cutting, absolutely clean. No leaking. Proper circular geometry. Thank you to RollAndrei and hot_skillet_only specifically — the skillet temperature explanation was the missing piece.

Batch-cooked Sunday. Four fillings in parallel: carnitas (the main event), black beans with epazote, Mexican red rice, and charred corn. Twelve burritos assembled, six for the week and six for the freezer. The carnitas took four hours but were mostly unattended. The beans were two hours, also unattended. The rice was 35 minutes. The corn took 10 minutes. Photos at each stage: the carnitas resting in the fat before crisping, the beans after two hours (the broth was dark and thick), the assembled burritos lined up before wrapping. This is the most satisfying Sunday cooking I do. The week is easier from Monday.

Two days of work, twenty four tamales, about six of which I would serve to another person. The rest are structurally sound and taste fine but look like they were assembled in the dark. Photo of the good six and one of the bad ones for honesty. The masa was too wet, which I knew at the time and pressed on anyway.

Saturday festival gig, two trucks, four hundred and twelve burritos out between eleven and eight. Photos of the line setup because people keep asking how we hold consistency at that volume. Short version. Everything is portioned before service, nothing is weighed during it. Rice and beans in hotel pans on the left, proteins centre, cold stuff right, wrap and press at the end. One person does nothing but roll for the whole service and does not move. The rolling person is the bottleneck and you should staff for that, not for the till.

Left is my first attempt in February. Right is last night. Same filling, same tortilla, same person. The difference is entirely fill weight and the two second rest before rolling, both of which I learned here. Posting this mostly for anyone currently at the February stage and assuming they are just bad at it. You are not. You are overfilling.

This is the photo category. Finished burritos, work in progress, catastrophic failures, all equally welcome. The failures are honestly more useful, because someone can usually tell you what went wrong from a photo of the seam. No rules beyond keeping it food. Tell us what is in it if you can be bothered.

Had this twice this week. Someone orders something the tortilla physically cannot hold, we build it anyway because they asked for it, and it comes apart in the wrapper before they get out the door. Then it's our fault.My kitchen lead thinks we should say something at the counter, along the lines of "that's a lot of filling, I can put it in a bowl or split it across two." I worry it comes across as telling people what they can and can't order, especially with someone who's been coming in for years and knows exactly what they want.Do you flag it, offer the bowl, or just build what was asked for and let the wrapper deal with it? 

Can Agreement Manager - (formerly "Navigator") work with MS Office?

We’re always updating our users on new features we launch via the community. It’s such a great way to communicate on a 1-to-many basis with our customers. Additionally, what’s even better is that we have started to launch beta testing groups on our community where we invite a certain number of customers to test new features before we release them.   Not only does this allow us to iron out any bugs before a full roll-out, it also creates a real feeling of collaboration and togetherness between us and our customers. Such a great way to make sure you are building a product that really meets the needs of your end users! 

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