The key to a perfect tortilla: steaming

In COVID quarantine, I have devoted my time to learning how to bake, and decided to try (one more time) to successfully make tortillas by hand.
I learned two important things: One is that there is really no point in trying to make flour tortillas. The factory-made ones that you buy at the grocery store are actually pretty good; and making flour tortillas at home is pretty difficult. It’s like bolognese sauce; what they sell at the store is as good as or better than anything I’m going to make.
Corn tortillas are another matter. Because corn flour has no gluten, it’s a much simpler process — and of course if you have gluten sensitivity, this is a perfect gluten-free food transport system.
An incentive to make these by hand is that they are easy and truly superior to the fairly rubbery and tasteless corn tortillas sold at even very good stores.
However, I’ve tried corn tortillas in the past and the end result was too dense and too hard. Which leads to the other important lesson I learned this year, from an internet recipe at https://thecafesucrefarine.com/best-ever-homemade-flour-tortillas.
It was recommended to me by Ken Dempsey, one of the talented PT specialists at Geer in North Canaan. This flour tortilla recipe has become a dinnertime staple for his family.
Even though I still think it’s easier to buy than make flour tortillas, this recipe taught me the Essential Trick for Making Corn Tortillas: You must steam them immediately after you cook them.
Where to find
masa harina
The only thing that is hard about making corn tortillas is that you have to buy special corn flour, which is called masa. You can’t substitute corn meal or polenta; this flour is specially treated so it’s smoother and less grainy.
Masa harina is very easy to find. You can get it at Tienda Mi Esquina, the new shop in Amenia, N.Y., at 3294 Route 343 (next door to the post office, at the intersection where there is also a bank and the Four Brothers restaurant). You can also usually find it at large grocery stores such as Freshtown, which is also in Amenia.
If you don’t have a bag of masa harina in the house, then, yes, you will have to leave the house to go buy it. But even with, say, a 40-minute round trip to the store it’s still faster to make corn tortillas (about 45 minutes total) than it is to make flour tortillas, which take two or three hours (because they are made with flour, which has gluten, and the gluten has to rest before you can roll it).
The recipe
The brand I buy is Maseca, and the bag specifies that you can use it to make tortillas. There are a couple other options, including one from Bob’s Red Mill.
But an added benefit of the Maseca brand, for me, was that it has a tortilla recipe on the package. It’s beautifully simple: Combine 2 cups of masa harina with 1 1/2 cups of warm water. If it seems dry, add a little more water, a teaspoon at a time.
Knead it for about 2 minutes in your mixing bowl. It’s a soft dough, and easy to knead. If you don’t know how to knead, you’re just basically pressing it together with the heel of your hand again and again until it comes together into a nice smooth dough, like Play Dough.
It’s very simple; don’t overthink it. Again, masa harina is much more forgiving than white flour.
After you mix the dough, cover it with a damp cloth or some plastic wrap so it doesn’t dry out.
Heat a cast iron skillet over a medium high flame; as with pancakes, you’ll want to adjust the flame as you go along.
Rolling
and steaming
This recipe makes about 20 tortillas. Before you start to roll them out, cut out 22 squares of parchment paper (waxed paper is fine if that’s all you have) that are about 6 or 8 inches square. This might seem wasteful or fussy but trust me on this one: It will make rolling out the tortillas very easy.
Here’s another thing that might sound fussy but will make a big difference. This is the trick I learned from Cafe Sucre Farine. Before you start to cook your tortillas, get a small Dutch oven or other covered ceramic vessel. You can even use a large bowl, with a plate on top.
As you take your tortillas off the skillet, drop them in your pot/bowl and cover it immediately. This will steam the cooked tortillas and make them pliant and delicious. Do not skip this step.
Back to the recipe: After you’ve made your dough, separate it into 20 balls that are about the size of a golf ball. What I found easiest was to roll the dough out into a long log, wrapped in plastic, and then I divided the dough in half and in half and in half and …
Keep the dough balls covered; if they get dry and start to break when you handle them, just put a little water on your hands as you work.
Roll each ball out to about a 1/8 inch thick circle, between two squares of parchment. Leave the circles between the parchment, so they stack nicely and don’t dry out.
Cook them one at a time on your hot skillet. I find it helps if you put a tiny bit of canola oil in the skillet, but you don’t have to.
Cook each side for about 45 seconds; if your flame is hot enough, you should get brown spots.
Your tortillas will taste best right after you cook them. If you don’t eat them the same day you make them, wrap two or three in some plastic wrap and then put each of your packets of wrapped tortillas in a zippered freezer bag.
To reheat them, wrap them in foil and put them in a 275 degree oven for about 10 minutes.
Jim Archer of Elk Ravine Farm takes a seat on Billy the water buffalo on Wednesday, Sept. 10.
AMENIA — Jim Archer doesn’t look like a typical “influencer.” He doesn’t have a podcast and he doesn’t take jet-setting trips to Bali for advertising shoots.
But he has amassed a following of more than 100,000 people across his Instagram and TikTok accounts. Archer shows off his unique collection of farm animals and produces educational content about ecology and the environment all from Elk Ravine Farm, his property on Smithfield Valley Road in Amenia.
Archer bought the farm 30 years ago. He was living in Katonah, New York — where he grew up — and finding success as a contractor when he decided he wanted plenty of land in the country.
He bought the 90-acre property and spent 10 years prepping and building before he could move onto the farm. Then the real work could begin.
Archer has a passion for environmentalism and conservation that runs deep. His farm is under conservation easement with the Dutchess Land Conservancy, and the main goal of his operation is to raise livestock to aid in maintaining endangered habitats.
Archer raises Scottish Highlands cattle and Southeast Asian water buffalo because of their affinity for rugged terrain and dense, unappetizing foliage. They serve as all-natural weed-eaters, Archer said, going into habitats and eating plants that more typical livestock would avoid.
“They’re replacing an herbivore that has become extinct through millennia,” Archer said.
This strategy centers natural habitat management strategies rather than herbicides that could leach into water tables, potentially causing more harm to critters than the good that would come from removing invasive plants.
The water buffalo are especially fond of an invasive called phragmites — also known as common reed. These non-native plants form dense clods that choke out native species, according to the New York Invasive Species Information website, eventually killing all diversity in a wetland.
“Scottish highlanders don’t want to go where the footing is bad,” Archer said. “So I asked if we could proceed with Southeast Asian water buffalo and we’ve been working with them for about two years now.”
The operation is under expansion with 13 water buffalo and between 35 and 40 highlands cattle.
Archer’s environmental work is expensive, though, and he refuses to accept donations or even volunteer labor to help him with his operation. Instead, he sells educational tours of his Amenia farm to fund the conservation efforts. “I have to earn what I get,” Archer said.
Jim Archer keeps sheep, goats, pigs, emus, horses and a variety of fowl on his farm on Smithfield Valley Road in Amenia.
Archer has amassed a menagerie of animals at his 90-acre farm — all raised from adolescence by him and his fiancee — including pigs, sheep, highlands cattle, water buffalo, emus, goats, pheasants, horses, pigeons, ducks and peafowl.
Tourists start by meeting the highlands cattle, the animal that generally draws a group to the farm, Archer said. “Everybody wants to pet a fluffy cow.”
Archer’s tours put visitors in direct contact with nearly every animal on his farm, except for the horses. Those are just for pulling Archer’s restored stage coaches, including a re-creation horse-drawn ambulance — a hobby for him and his fiancée.
The experience can be overwhelming for some. “I get a lot of people that cry,” Archer said, because many of his visitors are urban or suburbanites with limited experience with animals, and the interactions can be moving.
“Somebody was suffering a loss of their partner,” Archer said. “They came here to see the animals to help through their grieving process. Billy, the water buffalo, was laying down so she sat down and he put his head in her lap. The whole time we were there — 30, 45 minutes — she was just there bonding with him.”
“Emus are dinosaurs,” Jim Archer said as he exposed the claw located on his emu’s wing.Nathan Miller
Nathan Miller
The most divisive animals on the property are the emus. Archer has five of them that live in an enclosure with some goats. The emus are curious and friendly, but they have a funny way of showing it. The birds have to explore things using beaks, leading to a lot of nibbling and pecking as visitors stand in the pen with them. Some people, understandably, find that a little annoying, Archer said.
Interested visitors can book tours through Archer’s website, www.elkravinefarm.com, or by texting 914-262-4737. A two-hour tour of the farm for a group of four people costs $250. An appointment is required to visit the farm.
SHARON — Sharon Dennis Rosen, 83, died on Aug. 8, 2025, in New York City.
Born and raised in Sharon, Connecticut, she grew up on her parents’ farm and attended Sharon Center School and Housatonic Valley Regional High School. She went on to study at Skidmore College before moving to New York City, where she married Dr. Harvey Rosen and together they raised two children.
Sharon’s lifelong love of learning and the arts shaped both her work and her passions. For decades, she served as a tour guide at the American Museum of Natural History and the Asia Society, sharing her knowledge and enthusiasm with countless visitors. She also delighted in traveling widely, immersing herself in other cultures, and especially treasured time spent visiting her daughter and grandsons in Europe and Africa.
She was also deeply connected to her hometown, where in retirement she spent half her time and had many friends. She served as President of the Sharon East Side Cemetery until the time of her death, where generations of her family are buried and where she will also be laid to rest.
She is survived by her husband, Harvey; her children, Jennifer and Marc; and four beloved grandchildren.
Claire and Garland Jeffreys in the film “The King of In Between.”
There is a scene in “The King of In Between,” a documentary about musician Garland Jeffreys, that shows his name as the answer to a question on the TV show “Jeopardy!”
“This moment was the film in a nutshell,” said Claire Jeffreys, the film’s producer and director, and Garland’s wife of 40 years. “Nobody knows the answer,” she continued. “So, you’re cool enough to be a Jeopardy question, but you’re still obscure enough that not one of the contestants even had a glimmer of the answer.”
Garland Jeffreys never quite became a household name, but he carved out a singular place in American music by refusing to fit neatly into any category. A biracial New Yorker blending rock, reggae, soul and R&B, he used genre fusion as a kind of rebellion — against industry pigeonholes, racial boundaries and the musical status quo. Albums like “Ghost Writer” (1977) captured the tension of a post–civil rights America, while songs like “Wild in the Streets” made him an underground prophet of urban unrest. He moved alongside artists like Lou Reed and Bruce Springsteen but always in his own lane — part poet, part agitator, part bridge between cultures.
“I think what I tried to do with the film, wittingly or unwittingly, was just to show that we all have these lives and they don’t often meet our dreams of what we think we’re entitled to, we’re talented enough to get or whatever,” said Claire. “We all have these goals, but we’re sort of stymied. Often, it’s partly circumstance and luck, but it’s also very often something that we’re doing or not doing that’s impeding us.”
This is not the typical rock-and-roll redemption story. There are no smashed guitars, no heroic overdoses, no dramatic comeback tour. What we get instead is something quieter and more intimate: hours of archival footage that Claire spent years sorting through. The sheer effort behind the film is palpable — so much so that, as she admitted with a laugh, it cured her of any future ambitions in filmmaking.
“What I learned with this project was A, I’m never doing it again. It was just so hard. And B, you know, you can do anything if you collaborate with people that know what they’re doing.”
Claire worked with the editing team of Evan M. Johnson and Ben Sozanski and a slew of talented producers, and ended up with a truthful portrayal — a beautiful living document for Garland’s legions of fans and, perhaps most importantly, for the couple’s daughter, Savannah.
“She’s been in the audience with me maybe three or four times,” said Claire. “The last time, I could tell that she was beginning to feel very proud of the effort that went into it and also of being a part of it.”
Savannah pursued a career in music for a while herself but has changed tracks and become a video producer.
“I think she couldn’t quite see music happening for herself,” said Claire. “She was like, ‘I don’t know if I want to struggle the way I saw my dad struggling and I’m going to get a job with a salary.’”
The film doesn’t just track the arc of an underappreciated musician, however. The music, always playing, is the soundtrack of a life — of a man navigating racial, musical and personal boundaries while balancing marriage, parenthood, aging, addiction andrecovery. Garland and Claire speak plainly about getting sober in the film, a life choice that gave them both clarity and shows Claire as a co-conspirator in his survival.
“I did some work early on with a director,” said Claire. “He wanted the final cut, and I didn’t feel like I could do that — not because I wanted so much to control the story, but I didn’t want the story to be about Alzheimer’s.”
Diagnosed in 2017, Garland, now 81, is in the late stages of the disease. Claire serves as his primary caregiver. The film quietly acknowledges his diagnosis, but it doesn’t dwell — a restraint that feels intentional. Garland spent a career refusing to be reduced: not to one sound, one race or one scene. And so the documentary grants him that same dignity in aging. His memory may be slipping, but the film resists easy sentimentality. Instead, it shows what remains — his humor, his voice, his marriage, the echo of a life lived on the edges of fame and at the center of his own convictions.
The Moviehouse in Millerton will be screening “The King of In Between” on Sept. 20 at 7 p.m. Peter Aaron, arts editor of Chronogram Magazine will conduct a talkback and Q&A with Claire Jeffreys after the film. Purchase tickets at themoviehouse.net.
The Haystack Book Festival, a program of the Norfolk Hub, brings renowned writers and thinkers to Norfolk for conversation. Celebrating its fifth season this fall, the festival will gather 18 writers for discussions at the Norfolk Library on Sept. 20 and Oct. 3 through 5.
Jerome A. Cohen, author of the memoir “Eastward, Westward: A Lifein Law.”Haystack Book Festival
For example, “Never Take the Rule of Law for Granted: China and the Dissident,” will be held Saturday, Sept. 20, at 4 p.m. at the Norfolk Library. It brings together Jerome A. Cohen, author of “Eastward, Westward: A Life in Law,” and Mark Clifford, author of “The Troublemaker: How Jimmy Lai Became a Billionaire, Hong King’s Greatest Dissident, and China’s Most Feared Critic” in dialogue with journalist Richard Hornik to discuss the rule of law and China.
The Council on Foreign Relations stated, “Few Americans have done more than Jerome A. Cohen to advance the rule of law in East Asia. He established the study of Chinese law in the United States. An advocate for human rights, Cohen has been a scholar, teacher, lawyer, and activist for sixty years.”
Cohen, a professor at New York University School of Law and director of its U.S.-Asia Law Institute, revealed his long view on China: “We are now witnessing another extreme in the pendulum’s swing toward repression. Xi Jinping is likely to outlive me but ‘no life lives forever.’ There will eventually be another profound reaction to the current totalitarian era.”
Mark Clifford, author of “The Troublemaker: How Jimmy Lai Became a Billionaire, Hong Kong’s Greatest Dissident, and China’s Most Feared Critic.”Haystack Book Festival
In “The Troublemaker,” Clifford chronicles Lai’s life from child refugee to pro-democracy billionaire to his current imprisonment by the Chinese Communist Party. Clifford is president of the Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong Foundation, a Walter Bagehot Fellow at Columbia University, and holds a PhD in history from the University of Hong Kong. He was the former editor-in-chief of the South China Morning Post and The Standard (Hong Kong and Seoul).
Journalist Richard Hornik, adjunct senior fellow at the East-West Center in Honolulu.Haystack Book Festival
Richard Hornik, adjunct senior fellow at the East-West Center, will moderate the discussion. Hornik is the former executive editor of AsiaWeek, news service director of Time magazine, and former Time bureau chief in Warsaw, Boston, Beijing and Hong Kong.
Betsy Lerner, author of “Shred Sisters,” is giving the 2025 Brendan Gill lecture at the Haystack Book Festival.Haystack Book Festival
The Brendan Gill Lecture is a highlight of the festival honoring longtime Norfolk resident Brendan Gill, who died in1997. Gill wrote for The New Yorker magazine for fifty years. Betsy Lerner, New York Times-recognized author of “Shred Sisters,” will deliver this year’s lecture on Friday, Oct. 3, at 6 p.m. at the Norfolk Library.
Visit haystackbookfestival.org to register. Admission is free.
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