Mission Olio Novello & White Sonora Wheat: An Olive Oil Tortilla

The Meeting of Two Heritage Ingredients

When my friend and colleague Dan Flynn suggested tortillas for our annual Olio Novello recipe collaboration, he mentioned a connection between California Mission olives and White  Sonora wheat (aka Sonora Blanca). These are two North American heritage species shaped by landscape, time, and the people who continued to work with them long after easier paths appeared.

Dan’s Olive Oil Tortilla brings these histories together in the most unassuming way: fresh oil meeting a warm rustic flatbread. He gave me a beautifully handmade stack which I've enjoyed with breakfast twice this week, and experimented with cinnamon and sugar roll ups one night and gently warmed and slathered with California honey on another. 

Olive Oil Tortilla: A Heritage Grain and a Fresh Oil

By Dan Flynn
Order a waffle at almost any breakfast joint in the country and most likely you will get the same sorry, bland, bleached waffle, as if all are born from the same foodservice flour mix. At my house I want a waffle with soul. I mill whole grains straight into the mixing bowl and let them ferment overnight with buttermilk and sourdough starter. The next day I add extra virgin olive oil and a few other ingredients. Then I cook them over a burner in a very hot, century-old Griswold waffle iron. That, for me, is the “ultimate” waffle.

Flour tortillas deserve the ultimate treatment as well. The mass-market flour tortilla has been designed less for deliciousness than for securing the filling for a burrito or wrap. We can do better.

Let’s stipulate that our ultimate tortillas are going to feature extra virgin olive oil. Yes, lard is traditional, delicious, and integrates beautifully in the flour. But we are olive oil people.

Using almost any flour in a homemade tortilla will taste better than the mass-produced product but, since we are attempting the ultimate tortilla, I milled White Sonora Wheat, which I had bought at a local farmer’s market.

Sonora is the O.G. variety for tortillas, thriving for centuries in the Sonora desert borderlands of California, Arizona and Mexico. Sonora wheat was the reason the native residents switched from corn to flour tortillas, a legacy that influences our understanding of Mexican cuisine to this day. Learn more at Slow Food USA.

King Arthur Flour provides a serviceable tortilla recipe, which we've adapted here. I found that flattening the dough between sheets of plastic wrap helped me transfer the tortilla onto the hot iron cooktop. I used a tortilla press to flatten half the batch, and I admired the uniformly circular stack that resulted. I then hand-patted the other half of the batch, and every tortilla was a misshapen blob. I preferred the ugly ones. After grilling I gave the tortilla a final blistering over an open burner.

These Sonora tortillas commanded my attention with their deep flavor: graham cracker, milkiness, sweetness, and balance. Fresh tortillas and fresh olive oil - what a great time of year.