Gluten-Free Waffle Grid Tortillas

The waffle grid comes from using a waffle-cone maker, but not the cone shaper. These tortillas, made with rice flour, are thin and pliable, like crepes. They stick to themselves with a mild PostIt stickiness. The stickiness makes for keeping rollup shapes together, making them good for rolling up fillings. The sesame oil provides an aromatic flavor.

My pixstrip shows the following images:

1. Equipment and utensils
2. Ingredients
3. Bowl with mixed ingredients, cooling in fridge, then out of the fridge
4. Tortilla-baking process by using the waffle cone maker
5. Finished gluten-free, no-added-sugar, waffle-grid tortillas

Equipment and utensils (spray oil being a bridge from equipment to baking process)

• Waffle cone maker
• Mixer (I used an electric hand mixer.)
• Measuring cups
• Measuring spoons
• Rubber spatula(s)
• Plastic spatula
• Mixing bowl(s)
• Cooling rack

Ingredients and mixing

• 1 egg
• 2 tablespoons cooking oil
• 1 tablespoon sesame oil
• 1 C milk
• 1 C rice flour (available in Asian store or ethnic part of a supermarket(
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• Spray oil for appliance surfaces, about every fourth tortilla

1. Beat the egg.
2. Add the salt and beat more.
3. Add the oils and milk and mix more.
4. Carefully add the flour, which has a very fine consistency. (The batter will be very thin.)
5. Cover the mixing bowl with food wrap and let it sit in the refrigerator.
6. After an hour, take out the batter, remove the food wrap, and remix the batter for a few seconds.

Process completion (baking, etc.)
Prepare the iron as instructed with your appliance. Because I've used mine a few times, I've only wiped the cooking surfaces with a clean, warm, damp kitchen rag for cleaning preparation, sprayed the cooking surfaces, and plugged the cord. Heating time is a minute or so.

1. Spray oil onto both waffle cone maker surfaces and heat it.
2. Scoop batter (1-oz cup or 2 tablespoons) onto the horizontal surface. (Pouring slightly towards the back makes for easier clanshell closing.) Close the lid and press down with fingernails for about 15 seconds to ensure the lid stays closed, then time for another 45 seconds. The hold-down instruction might not apply to other appliance brands.
3. Open the clamshell to check for tortilla doneness (light to medium brown color).
4. Use spatula to lift the tortilla onto the cooling rack.
5. Roll the tortilla now or later.
6. Continue the batter dispensing and baking process until you use up the batter. (Use spray oil about every fourth tortilla.)

The recipe makes about 15 tortillas, 5-6 inches wide (~53-58 calories each, depending on nonfat or whole milk). Suggested fillings for microwaving in these disks: cheese, cheese and spinach, cheese and broccoli. Mmmm, cheese.

Tubular Waffle Grid Wafers 2

Back in August, I published my recipe for Tubular Waffle Grid Wafers that I used test tubes for helping shape the cooked wafers. (I wanted to use my waffle cone appliance to make shapes besides waffle cones.) This time, I used a 3 x 8 grid text tube rack for holding the shapes. The rack is open air, better for air circulation and avoiding trapping steam than the set of test tubes I used previously. Also, the 24 vertical cavities means I can stand up a lot more tubular wafers.

My pixstrip shows the following images:

1. Equipment and utensils
2. Ingredients and mixing
   1. Eggs and salt, to be mixed together first
   2. Sugar, to be added to the eggs and salt mixture (Yes, I'm reusing this and the next pix of ingredients.)
   3. Rest of ingredients
3. Process completion
   1. Batter baking process (1st and 2nd image in the 2nd row)
   2. A rolled baked wafer
   3. Finished tube wafers in the test tube rack (My batch of 18 includes a few substandard ones for cautionary note.)

Equipment and utensils (spray oil being a bridge from equipment to baking process)

• Waffle cone maker
• Mixer (I used an electric hand mixer.)
• Measuring cups
• Measuring spoons
• Rubber spatula(s)
• Plastic spatula
• Mixing bowl(s)
• Cooling rack
• Test tube rack, available online for less than $10

Ingredients and mixing (from the Simply Vanilla Wafer Cones recipe of the Bella Recipe Guide)

• 2 eggs
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 2/3 cup granulated sugar
• 1/3 C of water
• 2 tablespoons vegetable oil
• 1 C cake flour (can sub with 1 C flour -2 T flour +2 T cornstarch)
• 1 teaspoon vanilla

Recommended: Spray oil application about every other wafer or so.

1. Beat the eggs and salt.
2. Add the sugar and beat it. :-)
3. Add the water, oil, cake flour (or replacement flours), and vanilla.

Process completion (baking, etc.)
Prepare the iron as instructed with your appliance. Because I've used mine a few times, I've only wiped the cooking surfaces with a clean, warm, damp kitchen rag for cleaning preparation, sprayed the cooking surfaces, and plugged the cord. Heating time is a minute or so.

For each disk, pour about 2 T batter, close the lid, and heat for about 30 seconds. Move the cooked disk onto the cooling rack, roll it up, and slide it into a cavity. Continue the batter dispensing and baking process until you use up the batter. My calculations for calories, about 93 calories for each tube.

Tubular Waffle Grid Wafers

These tubes are soft rollups that you can spread frosting or other sweet filling in. The softness comes from rolling up baked waffle-cone wafers and dropping them into cylinders that are narrow enough for steam to stay in. For my recipe, I used color-coded 1-inch diameter test tubes. The recipe is actually from the waffle-cone machine manufacturer for making waffle cones. I wanted to try making tubes, as I don't keep ice cream in the house. If you want crispy tubes, roll each baked waffle around a dowel or chop stick and hold them together for a few seconds. (For my next experiment for making crispy tubes will be trying a fortune cookie batter recipe, a test tube rack, or both.)
My pixstrip show the following images:

1. Equipment and utensils
2. Ingredients and mixing
   
   1. Eggs and salt, to be mixed together first
   2. Sugar, to be added to the eggs and salt mixture
   3. Rest of ingredients
3. Process completion
   
   1. Batter baking process (1st and 2nd image in the 2nd row)
   2. A set of rolled baked wafers
   3. Finished tube wafers
   4. Some tubes and frosting (filling optional)

Equipment and utensils (spray oil being a bridge from equipment to baking process)

• Waffle cone maker
• Mixer (I used an electric hand mixer.)
• Measuring cups
• Measuring spoons
• Rubber spatula(s)
• Plastic spatula
• Mixing bowl(s)
• Cooling rack
• Cylinders (I used test tubes—aka "test tube shooters"—that I bought at Urban Outfitters, which are also available online.)

Ingredients and mixing (from the Simply Vanilla Wafer Cones recipe of the Bella Recipe Guide)

• 2 eggs
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 2/3 cup granulated sugar
• 1/3 C of water
• 2 tablespoons vegetable oil
• 1 C cake flour (can sub with 1 C flour -2 T flour +2 T cornstarch)
  

  Note: I'm 'fessing up to having putting only 2/3 the amount of flours because I, duh, misread my list of ingredients

• 1 teaspoon vanilla

Recommended: Spray oil application about every other wafer or so.

1. Beat the eggs and salt.
2. Add the sugar and beat it. :-)
3. Add the water, oil, cake flour (or replacement flours), and vanilla.

Process completion (baking, etc.)
Prepare the iron as instructed with your appliance. Because I've used mine a few times, I've only wiped the cooking surfaces with a clean, warm, damp kitchen rag for cleaning preparation, sprayed the cooking surfaces, and plugged the cord. Heating time is a minute or so.
For each disk, pour about 1 T batter, close the lid, and heat for about 30 seconds.

Note: If you want to make cones or bigger tubes, which won't easily fit into test tubes, pour 2 T. With 1 T batter, the lid locks fine. More than 1 T at a time, the lid tends to not stay locked. In my past recipe for waffle-grid tortillas, I held down the lid, using an oven pad for each hand. (Warning: The lid gets hot.)

Move the cooked disk onto the cooling rack, roll it up, and drop it into a cylinder. Continue the batter dispensing and baking process until you use up the batter. (My pixstrip shows a set of six filled, poured out tubes, and tubular wafers.)

I wound up with 22 tubes and some 2-T batter disks. Those disks didn't last long enough to make it into the picture. :-) My calculations for calories, considering my reduced amount of flours, came to about 50 calories for each tube. Placing about a teaspoon of frosting nudges the calories by another 25. IOW, the plate of four as shown in the pixstrip amounts to about a 300-calorie snack, about the amount in a good-sized candy bar. Eater beware!

Waffle-grid Tortilla Recipe to Avoid

Instead, make use of some tortilla and biscuit recipes that I compiled links to for ideas. My previous blog article was a recipe for making tortillas by using a waffle cone iron. It was an experiment for omitting sugar in cones and saving loads of calories. The sugarless cones did not harden or keep their moldable shapes like the sugary ones, so I decided to call them waffle-grid tortillas and use them for wraps and foldovers.

I wanted to be able to present a recipe that made use of an online recipe for flour tortillas, using my cone waffle iron as a means to cook both sides of the tortilla. The panfry method requires frying one side of a tortilla and flipping it to cook the other side.

As I researched flour tortilla recipes, I noticed a commonality of ingredients, five items: all-purpose flour, baking powder, salt, fat, and fluid. Somehow, I veered into looking up biscuit recipes, many of which had the same five ingredients. The major difference between flour tortillas and biscuits were as follows:

• Biscuit dough—at least twice as much fat as tortilla dough
• Tortilla dough—much more handling (kneading/rolling) than biscuit dough (minimal mixing)
• Tortilla dough—one to two "rest" periods of about 10 to 20 minutes each, depending on recipe, but none for biscuit dough
• Pre-cooking shapes—tortilla dough sheet, to dough balls, to flattened shapes; biscuit dough sheet, to shapes cut with a measuring cup or biscuit cutter

I followed a simple tortilla recipe for ingredients, up until flattening the dough balls. Instead of using a rolling pin or palote, I used thumbs and fingers. Instead of pan frying each tortilla, I baked it in my waffle cone appliance, pressing the clamshell down with a couple of hot pot holders. The results looked decent, although a bit thick. I even took pictures of the stages, so optimistic that waffle-grid tortillas (II) would turn out well!

What a surprise and disappointment to discover they are tough! Not one to throw out food, I've been eating some in small bites, spread with butter and lightly heated. I'm emphasizing that these tortillas were not good results! If you infer the process and try your own batch, don't be surprised that you come up with the same chewy results. If you do come up with more tender results, let me know!

Revisiting some of the recipes, biscuit recipes warned of toughness from overhandling, but the tortilla recipe instructions seemed to contradict, seeming to require dough-playing. Another thought that came to mind was compressing the dough while cooking might have contributed to the less-than-desired results, as the actual recipes indicate airy heat.

The following recipe links that I compiled call for the ingredients in common of all-purpose flour, baking powder, salt, fat, and fluid:

Flour Tortillas

• http://www.cooks.com/rec/view/0%2C1757%2C130189-249197%2C00.html
• http://www.food.com/recipe/flour-tortillas-diaz-101601 (scalable)
• http://allrecipes.com/recipe/homemade-flour-tortillas/ (scalable)
• http://www.texasrollingpins.com/tortillarecipe.html

Biscuits

• http://www.cooks.com/rec/doc/0,164,151169-240195,00.html
• http://oldfashionedliving.com/biscuits.html
• http://vegetarian.about.com/od/breakfastrecipe1/r/biscuit1.htm

The recipes that called for shortening or lard instead of oil required cutting the fat into the dry ingredients before mixing in the fluid. The recipe I used called for oil, which I stirred into the fluid (milk). Most of the recipes called for water for the fluid, but some called for milk. Maybe some knowledgeable cook can enlighten about using milk vs. water, aside from nutritional benefits of using milk.

All my previous articles featuring recipes were successes. This time, I wrote about a failed recipe. In failure, however, lessons learned, with curiosity for a different approach in the future, is an experience gained.

Waffle-grid Tortillas

Just after Christmas while browsing for post-holiday sales in a department store, I spotted a clerk placing a sale sign for an appliance that I'd been lightly considering buying for the last couple of years. I'd seen waffle cone makers selling for $20, which I just wasn't willing to commit for. Woohoo! The sign said $7.99! What a deal! It took me a couple of months to try a recipe. A bit time consuming, and calorie-loaded because of a lot of sugar called for.

About a month later, I talked to an associate about waffle cones, how I was amazed that the baked disks were moldable for about only 10 seconds. He speculated that sugar in the batter crystallizes during the baking and hardens them when they cool. I decided to try making sugarless waffle cones. Well, I confirmed that the baked results did not retain a molded shape after cooling, whether cone or tube. So, this recipe is making waffle-grid tortillas, which are good for folding over or rolling up after microwaving fillings in them. (I've tried cheese and spinach, and cheese only.)

My tortilla recipe has significantly fewer calories than either the Simply Vanilla Wafer Cones or Orange Cinnamon Waffle Cones recipe at the Bella Waffle Cone Maker pdf manual, which I used for my basis. My tortilla batch makes about 11 5-inch disks. Interestingly, both waffle cone recipes claim 6-9 sweet cones for 2-3 T batter per waffle shape, although the volume of flour differs by about a third: 2/3 C flour all-purpose vs. 1 C cake flour.

My pixstrip's boundaries delineate the following sections:

1. Equipment and utensils
2. Ingredients
   1. Eggs and mixing
   2. Flour (replacement for cake flour)
   3. Oil and water, and mixing them into the flour and eggs
3. Batter baking process
4. Baked tortilla, microwaving with cheese (foldover, rollup)

Equipment and utensils

• Waffle cone maker
• Mixer (I used an electric hand mixer.)
• Measuring cups
• Measuring spoons
• Rubber spatula(s)
• Plastic spatula
• Mixing bowls
• Cooling rack
• Cone shaper (for reference only, in case you decide to make sweet waffle cones)

Ingredients

I created the following table that shows ingredients and amounts for two model waffle cone recipes, and the would-have-been unsweetened cone recipe.

Note: Recipe #1 sweet refers to Orange Cinnamon Waffle Cones. Recipe #2 sweetrefers to Simply Vanilla Wafer Cones.

Ingredient	#1 sweet	#2 sweet	Tortilla
1 whole egg + 1 egg white	✔	—	—
2 eggs	—	✔	✔
1/4 t salt	✔	✔	✔
1/2 C granulated sugar	✔	—	—
2/3 C granulated sugar	—	✔	—
1 t ground cinnamon	✔	✔	—
2/3 C sifted all-purpose flour	✔	—	—
1 C cake flour (can sub with 1 C flour -2 T flour +2 T cornstarch)	—	✔	—
2/3 C cake flour (subbed with 2/3 C all-purpose flour -4/3 t flour +4/3 t cornstarch)	—	—	✔
2 T butter, melted and cooled slightly	✔	—	—
2 T vegetable oil	—	✔	✔
1 t orange extract	✔	—	—
1 t vanilla extract	—	✔	—
1/3 C water (Add more if needed.)	✔	✔	✔

Recommended: Spray oil application about every other tortilla or so.

 Eggs and mixing

Beat the eggs. If you want to make cone waffles, this is the stage where you mix in sugar after beating the eggs, then also add extract(s).

 Flour (replacement for cake flour)

Choose the flour type and amount. I used the 2/3 C cake flour replacement.

 Oil and water, and mixing them into the flour and eggs

Blend the flour, cake flour, or cake flour substitutions into the beaten eggs.

Batter baking process

Prepare the iron as instructed with your appliance. Because I've used mine a few times, I've only wiped the cooking surfaces with a clean, warm, damp kitchen rag for cleaning preparation, sprayed the cooking surfaces, and plugged the cord. Heating time is a minute or so.

For each disk, pour about 2 T batter, close the lid, and heat for about 60 seconds.

Note: The lid tended to not stay locked, so I held down the lid, using an oven pad for each hand. (Warning: The lid gets hot.)

Move the cooked disk onto the cooling rack. Continue the batter dispensing and baking process until you use up the batter.

Baked tortilla, microwaving with cheese (foldover, rollup)

If desired, as depicted on pixstrip, place filling on disk, microwave (about a minute, depending on filling, microwave power, and your preference), and fold over or roll up. Repeat for as many tacos or wraps as you want.

In case you want to use store-bought tortillas for fast preparation, try my convenient spinach-cheese taco recipe.