Burritos, home-made

A burrito is not so much a traditional Mexican food as it is a regional dish of northern Mexican and a fairly recent invention. The tortilla used to make a burrito is made with wheat flour, not corn meal or masa harina, and it's a big 10-inch tortilla. Burritos are also a specialty of San Francisco's Latino community and the city's Mission neighborhood. There, the burrito fillings are meat, whole cooked beans (not refried beans), rice, lettuce, bell peppers, diced fresh tomatoes, and cheese.

We lived in San Francisco for about 15 years, and we enjoyed burritos weekly. There was an excellent taqueria called La Corneta in the neighborhood where we lived from 1995 until 2003, and it was where we went for burritos. The photos in this post show the ingredients we used to make home-made burritos this week. The finished product is on the right, served with dollops of crème fraîche.

Here in France, we can buy such tortillas at the supermarket, and they're called wraps, pronounced [vrahp]. We bought a package of them at Intermarché a few days ago, and they were Mission brand but made in the Netherlands, according to the packaging. Other brands are available too.

I had cooked a big batch of black-eyed peas and I thought they'd be good in Mexican-style concoctions like enchiladas (made with smaller corn tortillas) and burritos. We made both over the course of the week. We also bought some bœuf à bourguignon (beef stew meat) and ground up 1½ lbs. of it to use in our burritos.

I had made a spicy enchilada sauce using tomato sauce, pureed potimarron (winter squash) pulp, some black-eyed pea broth, and of course spices including cumin and hot chili peppers — in this case, smoked chipotle peppers in adobo sauce. I brought these back from a trip to the U.S., but yesterday I learned that they are available on amazon.fr as well (several different brands). (Leftover chipotles and adobo sauce can be frozen in small containers for future use.) The enchilada sauce with some chipotles and adobo added made good seasoning for the beef.

The Mission-brand flour tortillas are tender and flexible, so it's easy to fill them with all the flavor ingredients and make burrito wraps with them. We also wrapped the wraps in aluminum foil so that we could heat up the burritos in the oven before serving them, mostly to melt the cheese we put inside them.