Homemade Corn Tortilla Chips

Nachos are yummy. 

Homemade tortilla chips are yummy.

Nachos with homemade tortillas chips? Perfection. 

I don't know about y'all, but food is getting hard to find at our little grocery store and the stores in the city have a lot of social distancing rules going on making it near impossible for me at 29 weeks pregnant to get the food we need. 

So I'm getting inventive. 

I've tried homemade tostadas before and they just haven't turned out right.  But when I couldn't find tortilla chips but I could find corn tortillas, I decided to give it another try. 

I initially bought a package of 80 corn tortillas for $3.  Every time I made chips, I used 2 cups of coconut oil (we buy it in bulk from Bulk Apothecary), 20 tortillas and a bit of salt.  20 tortillas gave me about 160 chips. 

So how do you do it?  Pull out a skillet and put your oil in, heat your oil until it's sizzling... While it's heating, get your tortillas cut-I cut the stack in 6-8 pieces depending on how big you like your chips, I do 8.  Lay out a sheet pan with paper towels for draining the oil off.  Once your oil is hot enough, start adding your chips.  I put a few in at a time until I know the oil is hot enough, then I do enough at a time to fill up the pan. 
Now, I don't have a thermometer to keep the oil at the perfect temperature, so I just pay close attention, remember the longer your oil is on the hot burner, the hotter it's going to get, so you may need to adjust the burner temperature.  It takes me about 20 minutes to get through the batch.

Don't mind the dirty stove... It needs a good scrubbing again. 
I let the tortillas stay on one side until I can either see a bit of brown around the edges or until it stops sizzling as much-you'll hear the difference.. then flip them and do it over again.  How long you leave them in also depends on how done you like your chips.  I usually end up burning the last few pan fulls in the batch, but they still taste scrumptious. 

After I get a few batches on the sheet pan I'll put some salt on and just toss after they cool off enough to handle.  I was putting salt on each batch as they were fresh from the pan, but they were too salty for us. 

To make tostada shells, just do the same thing, except don't cut your tortillas, put them in the pan whole. 

That's it, you're done.  Easy peasy. 

Sit down and enjoy the chips of your labor... Unless of course your kids eat them all.. In which case, gobble them up while you can.

~Tabitha