Tortas de Aceite

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For years now, I had been buying the tortas de aceite from Ines Rosales at the supermarket, but I think they must have discontinued their commercial relationship with them, because I haven't been able to find them recently :o(

So when I started craving them last week, I decided to make them myself.  I'm not a novice in the kitchen so it should be a piece of cake, right?

I found a recipe in one of my books but it didn't work out at all.  Granted I didn't roll out the dough thinly enough, but the taste was not what I was looking for.  So, I turned again to the giant cookbook that is the world wide web.

I encountered all kinds of variations, tortas with anise liquor, with eggwhites, with lemon flavoured olive oil, ... you name it and undoubtedly somebody must have tried it before.

I wanted an easy recipe which felt true to the original recipe, so few ingredients and nothing artificial. And then I came across the video posted by HojiBlanca, a Spanish olive oil cooperative from the North of Malaga Province and I knew I had found what I was looking for.

I adapted the amount of water and the recipe yielded more tortas than the video announced but they were excellent and were approved by my usual Spanish test panel :o)

Ingredients (yields 18 tortas) :

* 350g all purpose flour
* 1 tsp of dry yeast
* 100g olive oil
* 100g tepid water
* 1 Tbsp sesame seeds
* 1 Tbsp aniseed
* pinch of salt
* granulated sugar (I used sugar cane sugar)

Preparation :

In a large bowl, mix the flour, dry yeast and a pinch of salt.

Add the aniseed and sesame and stir all the ingredients together.

Make a hole in the dry ingredients and add the water and olive oil in it. Using a spoon, stir all the ingredients together until you have a flaky dough.

Remove from the bowl and knead the dough on your working surface for a couple of minutes until smooth.

Divide your dough in 18 little balls.

Fill a flat dish with granulated sugar.

Using a rolling pin, flatten each ball of dough to a disk with a thickness of 2mm.  Lift the dough from your work surface and put it on the sugar in the dish, coating one side of the torta with it.

Place the sugar coated tortas (sugary side up) on your baking tray, covered with wax paper and bake them for 15 minutes at 180°C.

Let them cool down and store them in an airtight tin box.  They should keep for a week at least, and maybe even longer but they never last that long around here :o)