Tortillas best eaten by nibble

LITTLE ROCK — You could do-rag your head with one of Brenda’s big flour tortillas or swaddle your sleeping newborn baby.

That, however, would be a shameful waste.

What you want to do with one of Brenda’s tortillas - and you can buy them smaller - is melt a sizable chunk of real butter in a large cast-iron skillet and gently layer in the tortilla.

Brown it slowly. Marvel as the air between layers of the tortilla heats, and the top flaky layer erupts into a thin-skinned golden mound. Turn the tortilla.

Remove it from the skillet when only slightly crisp.

And as one nibble leads to another, marvel that these tortillas are made right here in River City at Tortilleria Brenda, owned by a Mexican who wanted to give his family a life in the United States.

This is a good thing.

Tortillas are necessary to my survival. My mother grew up in El Paso, Texas.

Monday lunches at my grandmother’s house often were Sunday’s leftover roast and vegetables rolled up in a flour tortilla.

Rarely is my fridge bare of Brenda’s tortillas.

(Brenda is the owner’s daughter.)

Isidro Mendez is one of the craftsmen at the tortilla factory, where he opens shop at 5 a.m. to make enough dough for that day’s batch of 5,000.

By 7 a.m., Isidro is stuffing - to use the Spanish culinary term - blobs of tortilla dough into a machine that squeezes it into a rope, cuts the rope into biscuit-size slabs of dough, and conveys the slabs onto a tray, where Isidro rolls them into balls.

Once Isidro has racked up 5,000 dough balls, he rolls the rack to the gas tortilla oven.

He drops each ball onto the hot two-sided griddle, which flattens and drops each one onto a conveyer belt that runs through the flames. At the end of the line, Lila Hernandez lays out the tortillas to cool in stacks of 10 and bags them when they are cool.

George Martinez oversees his father’s two tortillerias, where they also make corn tortillas. (The tortillerias, where you can buy the tortillas, are at 5317 W. 65th St. and 7616 Colonel Glenn Road.)

Lila, who has lived in the United States for nine years, never learned to make her own but now that she works at Brenda’s, she doesn’t need to: “I’d rather buy them from the factory.”

On recent visits to Brenda’s, reporter Elizabeth Gamez accompanied me.

Elizabeth was born and raised in El Paso, almost in my mother’s neighborhood.

Elizabeth helped me with the interviews (my Spanish is limited to viola). She also made a mini-documentary. Thus she was there to share the moment when Isidro offered up tortillas hot out of the oven, straight off the conveyor belt.

What a surprise that Isidro would offer such a treat. I just happened to have a stick of butter and a jug of freshly made sweet tea.

“Dear y’all’s” video tour of Tortilleria Brenda is at tinyurl.com/dear-y-alltortillas. Gamez’s video is at tinyurl.com/dear-y-all-gamez.