The kinds of tortillas restau-rants are making, and the ways they're making them, vary from location to location.

The 380-seat Old Town Café, for example, has become a destination restaurant thanks to its famous "Tortilla Ladies of Old Town" who prepare more than 7,000 corn and flour tortillas daily, in full view of customers, completely from scratch.

"We buy corn, cook it at night, put it through an automated electric grinder, then the ladies make the corn tortillas and pat them by hand," Herb Lizalde, owner and general manager, says. "For the flour tortillas, we buy flour and they put it together with lard, baking powder and warm water, make balls, and roll the dough out with a [rolling] pin.

"It's a whole act—people come by, look in the windows. People know they're getting fresh tortillas, which have better flavor when they're handmade. We don't make any money on it, but we're known for our tortillas. The publicity itself makes it worth the effort," Lizalde reports. At Mazatlan, Medina's daughter Emily makes corn and flour tortillas in the restaurant's kitchen every day. For the corn tortillas, she uses instant corn flour to make dough, which she puts through a machine with two rollers that sheet and press the dough and wires that cut it into six-inch-diameter tortillas. For flour tortillas, she mixes salt, flour and hot water, kneads the mixture, forms balls and rolls the tortillas, one-by-one, by hand. "We use the corn tortillas for most all our dishes—we use at least 300 a day. We only use the flour tortillas for burritos," the chef/ owner explains.

And at Mickey's, owner Mickey Venegas relies on the flour tortillas his father Mike makes in his small, local tortilla factory to create the eatery's popular burritos and the famous "Annie's Original Taco," a menu mainstay named after his grandmother that is made with a deep-fried flour tortilla shell. He uses 800 to 1,000 6-inch tortillas and 400 to 500 12-inch, burrito-size tortillas every week.

To facilitate production (Mike makes about 600 dozen tortillas an hour), the family uses an automated machine that's a dough mixer, divider, press, oven, cooling conveyor and stacker in one unit. "It's all automation in the really big companies now, compared to ours where some of it is done manually," Mickey explains.

In general, the tortilla-making process can be broken down into a few simple steps, Hulsey says.

Flour Tortillas. You'll need a bowl-type mixer with a hook (a 30-quart capacity bowl will mix 25 pounds of flour, which will make approximately 300 7- to 8-inch tortillas); a rounder/divider which will cut dough into evenly weighted balls; and a press/oven that will press the dough balls (after they've rested five to ten minutes) to the desired thickness and then bake them for ten to 15 seconds on each side. Pre-formed dough balls are also available on the market today.

Several equipment options exist. "You can press the dough by hand with a tortilla press, then bake the tortilla on a griddle. You can use a machine press and bake the tortillas on a griddle. Or you can use an automated machine that presses and bakes them for you," Hulsey explains.

Corn Tortillas. It is fast and easy to use instant corn flour, which you mix with water for about three minutes to make the dough. If you use a hand press (the same used for wheat flour), Hulsey says to take a small amount of dough (approximately one ounce), flatten it, and bake it for 15 to 18 seconds on each side.

Corn tortillas made on machines are put between two rollers which determine the tortilla's thickness. The dough is transferred to the front roller, where a cutter makes an impression in the desired shape, and a wire peels the tortilla off the roller and onto a transfer belt which sends it to the oven. Sheeter heads are also sold separately, so you could form and cut the tortillas on the sheeter, then cook them by hand on the griddle, Hulsey says.

"The steps outlined offer progressively more expensive and space-consuming equipment, but each step up also provides more output per hour," Hulsey notes.

While no hard statistics exist on the prevalence of house-made flour versus corn tortillas, Avie Cohen of Independent Bakery Corp., a used bakery machine broker in Miami, Fla., believes more restaurants offer the flour version. That could be because so many corn tortillas are used in fried form—as chips, tostadas and taco shells—according to Hulsey.

"On these fried products, granulation, moisture and thickness are more important than freshness, since they determine the bite and texture of the product. The same goes for enchiladas, which are dipped in sauce or oil," he explains.