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If you’re a fan of soft tacos and sourdough, you will love this recipe for sourdough tortillas. It’s the best of both worlds! Homemade tortillas are always a treat, but making them with sourdough gives them superior flavor and digestibility.

We love to use these tortillas to make my mom’s cheeseburger enchiladas and our slow-cooker chicken tacos. My kids also like to use them to make mock buñuelos.

What Makes This Recipe So Great

This is honestly the best flour tortilla recipe you will find. These flour tortillas are easy to make using either sourdough discard or active starter.

I usually feed my starter a few hours before making the tortillas to speed up the fermentation process in the tortilla dough itself. But if you’re pressed for time, it’s fine to grab your starter straight from the fridge.

If you discard a starter when you feed yours, this is a great sourdough discard recipe. Remember you don’t have to use your discard immediately – you can collect it in a jar and keep it in the refrigerator for a few days.

While many sourdough recipes require hours of bulk fermentation and a number of stretches and folds, This one does not. You don’t want to develop the gluten through stretching and folding the way you do with sourdough bread because that will make it harder to press or roll out.

You can let the dough rest at room temperature for a few hours or more than 24 hours in the fridge. So it’s easy to make the dough when you have time and later have fresh tortillas with very little hassle.

Ingredients for sourdough tortillas

These tortillas are superior to store-bought tortillas, and one of the reasons is the simplicity of the ingredients. You only need just a few:

Sourdough starter/discard
Salt
Lard
Water

Ingredient Substitutions

There isn’t much to substitute here, but one ingredient you may not have handy is lard. In this case, you can easily substitute butter. I know that some people also use olive oil instead of lard. This one isn’t my favorite, but if you do use it, you may need to decrease the amount of water in the recipe a little bit.

Another thing to consider is the type of flour you use. I personally like to use all-purpose white flour. You can also use whole wheat flour. For that, I would suggest a longer resting (or bulk fermenting) time to help break down the whole grains.

Equipment for making sourdough tortillas

Tortilla presses may be all the rage, but the truth is, they’re unnecessary and, in some cases, ineffective.

In my experience, a tortilla press is excellent for corn tortillas, which have no gluten, and smash easily without snapping back. That’s one of the nice things about making corn tortillas.

With a flour tortilla, it can be easier to get adequately thin using a rolling pin.

So all that to say, the only equipment you need is:

Counter top space
A bowl
A rolling pin
A skillet

Instructions for making sourdough tortillas

Step one:

Combine flour and salt.

Step two:

Cut lard into flour mixture with a fork until it looks crumbly.

Step three:

Stir in water until you have a shaggy dough.

Step four:

Cover and let sit at room temperature for 2 1/2 hours, or cover with plastic wrap and store in the refrigerator for up to 24 hours.

Step five:

Separate dough into eight equal pieces and roll into balls.

Step six:

Lightly sprinkle all-purpose flour on your countertop, or use a piece of parchment paper for easy clean up, and roll each dough ball to about the thickness of a nickel.

For me, tortillas are very rarely perfectly round, but hey, imperfections are what make things beautiful.

Step seven:

Heat a cast iron skillet over medium-high heat, and cook each tortilla for about 30 seconds on each side until it’s flecked with golden brown flecks. The tortillas may bubble up as they cook, but they’ll mostly deflate as they cool.

Step eight:

Transfer cooked tortillas to a tea towel-lined tortilla warmer, bowl, or plate to keep warm before serving.

P.S. You can make more or fewer dough balls depending on the size you want your tortillas to be. For example, larger balls for wraps and burritos and smaller for street taco size.

These homemade tortillas are perfect for taco night and quesadillas.

How to store homemade sourdough tortillas

To store your tortillas for later, cool them entirely after cooking them, then store them in a ziplock or bread bag at room temperature for 1-2 days.

For longer storage, use a ziplock or other airtight container in the refrigerator for up to a week. I haven’t personally tried freezing homemade tortillas, so I can’t speak to that.

Other sourdough recipes to try: