The Important Tortilla Tip To Follow When Making Fajitas

If you love a good fajitas dish, it's essential to know how to make it properly. Sure, you might define good fajitas by that sizzling combination of meat and vegetables, but making your best fajitas starts with something entirely different: your tortillas.

Priming your tortillas to make fajitas is an underrated but undeniably important step in the cooking process. Choosing the correct type of tortilla will help keep your fajitas together instead of making a mess when you take that first bite. The temperature of the tortillas you use can also turn your fajitas from good to great. When you select tortillas for your fajitas, opt for flour over corn — no matter which type you like best. Also, make sure you warm them up long enough before you load them with the filling. Once they're fajita-ready, you're well on your way to living your best fajita life.

Flour and corn tortillas are interchangeable in some varieties of Mexican food, but when it comes to making fajitas, there's a reason the type you use matters. Flour tortillas have a softer texture than their corn counterparts but are less prone to breaking. Their ability to stretch makes them a winner for making things like burritos and fajitas, mainly because of the weight of that large scoop of meat and veggies. The sizzling mixture will stay in a flour tortilla but is likely to fall through corn — and there's nothing worse than your food not holding together.

Don't leave flour tortillas as is — be sure to heat them up before you top them. Just turn your oven to 350 F, wrap the tortillas in a damp paper towel and then in foil to retain their texture in the oven, and heat them for about 15 minutes. If you have longer than 15 minutes until you plan on serving the dish, turn the heat down to 200 F to keep them warm. The hot meat and warm tortillas will complement each other well — because they won't feel like fajitas if they aren't warm.

While corn tortillas are generally small, flour tortillas usually come in various sizes. Look for "fajita size" on your favorite brand's package, but if it doesn't explicitly say which size to use, you can quickly figure out the appropriate size without too much work.

Fajita tortillas are typically bigger than the corn tortillas used for tacos but are still smaller than burrito-sized tortillas. They're typically around 6 inches long, but the size of the tortilla you want will also depend on the size of your protein. Chicken or steak fajitas might need a larger tortilla than shrimp or veggie fajitas to encase the larger pieces of meat. Since you're not rolling up your filling, you won't need the extra space that a full-sized burrito tortilla — which usually clocks in around 10 inches — provides. Once you've mastered everything there is to know about choosing and preparing tortillas for fajitas, you're able to make the most mouthwatering fajitas ever.