California · Main
Mission-Style Burrito
- Intermediate
- 60 min
- roughly 2 of 4 for cost
Leads with richness that coats and comforts.
Ingredients
- 4 extra-large flour tortillas
- 500g carne asada or carnitas
- 400g Mexican rice, cooked
- 400g pinto or black beans
- 200g cheese, grated
- 1 avocado or guacamole
- Salsa and sour cream
- Foil for wrapping
Equipment
Grater / zester
The skills inside
ConfitSearing: the hard crustGriddle & plancha workSteaming: basket, leaf and lid
Allergen screen
Found: gluten · dairy
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Steam each tortilla until soft and pliable: it must stretch without tearing.
- Lay a line of rice, then beans, then meat, then cheese, salsa, guacamole, and sour cream down the center. Do not overfill, however tempting.
- Fold in the sides, then roll tightly from the bottom, tucking as you go.
- Wrap tightly in foil.
- Griddle the wrapped burrito briefly, or unwrap and sear the seam, to seal it.
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the techniques it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Griddle & plancha work 45 recipes
- Full contact with the metal: the food lies flat, with no dome in the middle and no curled edge lifting it away, so browning reaches the entire face rather than a ring of it.
- Contact is immediate and audible, and the food stays where it is put rather than sliding around in a slick of its own released liquid.
- The cooked face is an unbroken sheet of even colour: the whole surface browned, not a pattern of marks with pale ground between them, and not a dark centre with pale corners.
- The metal around the food is dry: no spreading wet patch steaming out from under it, nothing weeping onto the surface and boiling there.
- Turned once or twice and no more, and lifted while the crust is still brown: a piece flipped repeatedly never holds heat long enough to build one.
Where it goes wrong The surface was crowded and its temperature crashed, so everything gave up its water at once and stewed on the metal: pale, damp, grey at the edges, and stuck fast where the crust never got the chance to form.
Steaming: basket, leaf and lid 130 recipes
- Steam was running before the food went in: the water at a rolling boil and vapour coming steadily through the basket, rather than the whole thing warming up together.
- Nothing touches the water at any point: the food sits clear of it throughout, and the level neither drops enough to boil dry nor rises enough to wet it.
- The lid stayed on. Every lift costs the chamber its heat, and the number of lifts should be as close to none as the dish allows.
- Lifted out, the surface is glossy and plump with its colour heightened rather than dulled: greens brighter than they went in, not olive.
- Cooked through with the shape intact: it yields at the centre without having slumped or split, and there is no more than a spoonful of clean condensate beneath it.
Where it goes wrong The lid was loose or dripping and the condensate fell back onto the food, so it arrives waterlogged and pale with its seasoning washed down into the bottom of the dish.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Alpine white (dry Riesling, Grüner)
- Also Right
- Champagne: bubbles scrub richness
- From the Taps
- Bière de garde
- Zero-Proof
- Sparkling apple
Melted cheese coats; acid and carbonation scrub: high-cut whites and Champagne keep the fondue from winning.
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