These homemade flour tortillas make taco night even better! They taste better than any store-bought tortilla and are incredibly easy to make. Once you try these, you won’t want to go back!

Homemade flour tortillas are perfect for Crockpot Chicken Tacos, burritos, or White Chicken Enchiladas! Use these just like store-bought tortillas.

Some Important Tips:

Be sure to let the dough relax after dividing out the dough. This allows the gluten to relax, making rolling the tortillas a breeze. If your dough is too tough to roll out, let it rest a little longer.
Don’t worry about rolling them out into a perfect circle! It adds a nice rustic touch. If you would like perfect circles, invest in a tortilla press.
And no, you don’t have to use lard for great tasting tortillas! Yes, it may be authentic, but choose your fat and make them to suit your needs and tastes!

Ingredients: flour, fat, water, and salt.

How To Make Homemade Flour Tortillas

Allow yourself some time to make tortillas. While they are simple to make, they do take extra time, but they are so worth it!

First, you will want to melt your fat of choice with really hot water. In these pictures, I am using lard, but you can use any type of fat you prefer. This makes it ultra easy to incorporate into the flour. No cutting it in like you would with biscuits.

Next, stir together the flour and salt. Add the melted fat mixture and knead until smooth. I like to use a mixer for this, but you can also do it by hand. It really is a soft and easy dough to knead. I just like using a mixer because I am usually multitasking, lol.

Three pictures showing how to mix up the dough.

Divide the dough into 12 equal pieces and let the dough rest. As mentioned earlier, this is important. It allows time for the gluten to relax and makes rolling them out so much easier! I like to let them rest for 30ish minutes.

Two pictures showing how the dough is divided then rolled out.

You can roll the tortillas out very thin or keep them slightly thicker. However, I don’t recommend making them too thick, as they might appear undercooked. I like to make mine on the thinner side, as you can see from the picture.

Cook them briefly in a skillet just until light brown spots appear on both sides. Stack them on top of each other to allow them to steam, which will soften them.

Several tortillas stacked up and folded over.

Some Different Fat Options

Lard: Authentic tortillas use lard, which is rendered pork fat. Lard will give you the most flavorful, softest tortillas.

Vegetable shortening: Using shortening will not give the tortillas any flavor, and you may feel they are a little lackluster, but they will be nice and soft.

Butter: Butter will lend its delicious flavor to the tortillas. If you use butter, be sure to use unsalted.

Oil: You can use olive, avocado, vegetable, or canola oil. However, using oil will slightly alter the texture of the tortillas. They are still great to use and still better than the store-bought versions! I don’t recommend using coconut oil unless you like the flavor of coconut oil.

Fluffy Tortillas

If you make this recipe as described, your tortillas will be slightly chewy and very pliable. For a fluffier tortilla, add 1 teaspoon of baking powder to the flour and salt.