The tortilla is a life-saver in the kitchen: This humble food brilliantly bridges the gap between the most unlikely ingredients. Soft-scrambled eggs and corn chips? Cook them together and you’ve got Tex Mex migas. Sweet potatoes and green enchilada sauce? Put it in a cake pan and you’ve got a Budin Azteca. If you’re exclusively using tortillas to make quesadillas and tacos, it’s time to step up your game.
From chilaquiles to tortilla pie, here are 12 savory ways to incorporate more tortillas into your life.
Tortilla Soup with Chicken
Recipe: Serious Eats
To give soft tortillas some crunch, Serious Eats cuts them into strips and crisps them in the oven with a little oil. It’s the garnishes on this soup—crumbled queso fresco, cilantro, creamy avocado slices, and tortillas, of course—that make it a hit. (Photo: Serious Eats)
Tortilla Lasagna (Budin Azteca)
Recipe: Cooking Matters
A slathering of cheese and green enchilada sauce seals together hefty layers of spinach, sweet potato, mushrooms, and bell peppers between soft whole-wheat tortillas. (Photo: Cooking Matters)
Baked Huevos Rancheros
Recipe: Food & Wine
We’re into this sophisticated take on traditional huevos. Instead of the frying eggs, Food & Wine nestles runny yolks in gratin dishes of packed with crunchy tortillas and sauce. Craving something bigger? A well-seasoned cast-iron skillet will do the trick. (Photo: Food & Wine)
Tomatillo Chicken Cheese Sauce Nachos
Recipe: First We Feast
No one minds a soggy chip if it’s coated in a mass of chicken and cheese. We know nachos, so trust us on this one. Throw caution to the wind and load up your homemade chips with the good stuff. (Photo: Liz Barclay)
Spicy Chicken, Corn, and Zucchini Tortilla Pie
Recipe: Taste
Who doesn’t love a savory pie? The most satisfying part of this recipe is the perfect dimensions: Eight-inch tortillas fit perfectly into an eight-inch springform pan. Such sweet victory. (Photo: Taste)
Chipotle Beef Taquitos
Recipe: Our Best Bites
Instead of frying the taquitos, Our Best Bites fills up a sheet tray and bakes them until the cheese oozes out the sides. That means double the sour cream, right? (Photo: Our Best Bites)
Oven-Fried Pork Carnitas with Guacamole and Orange Salsa
Recipe: Food & Wine
These carnitas are the complete package—sweet and tangy from the tamarind marinade, spicy from the habanero-orange salsa, and blissfully creamy from the Requeson cheese and homemade guacamole. (Photo: Food & Wine)
Taco Bell’s Mexican Tortilla Pizza
Recipe: Honey, What’s Cooking?
To get a substantial crust like the real thing, sandwich refried beans and salsa between whole-wheat tortillas. Then top the pizza with more salsa, a whole mess of cheese, and a ridiculous amount of Taco Bell hot sauce. (Photo: Honey, What’s Cooking?)
Chilaquiles with Fried Eggs
Recipe: Bon Appétit
What’s not to love about homemade chips soaked in smoky red-chili sauce and topped with a fried egg? To create the perfect cheese-to-sauce-to-chip ratio, Bon Appétit adds a light coating of sauce to all the crispy tortillas, then cheese and more sauce to half the batch. The broiler does the rest of the work. (Photo: Bon Appétit)
Dos Toros-style Burrito
Recipe: First We Feast
Take Dos Toros owner Leo Kremer’s advice for perfect at-home burritos: Make everything bigger. Extra-large flour tortillas and huge batches of just-seasoned fillings produce that authentic West Coast taqueria experience. And don’t get crazy with the seasonings—a little salt and pepper will do just fine. “Let the meat express itself,” says Kremer. (Photo: First We Feast)
Tex Mex Migas
Recipe: Serious Eats
Not to be confused with Spanish, Portuguese, or Mexican varieties, this classic hangover cure combines the powers of soft-scrambled eggs, crunchy chips, and onions. Depending on your level of lucidity, Serious Eats offers tips for getting a perfectly balanced bite. If you throw everything in a pan and call it a morning, we won’t fault you though. (Photo: Serious Eats)
Almost from Scratch Tortillas
Recipe: Mark Bittman for The New York Times
The authentic way of making tortillas involved grinding lime-cured corn kernels (hominy) into a paste, but we’ll forgive you for taking a short cut and using masa harina, a fine corn flour. While it’s a lot of preparation for a typical weeknight meal, the ideal vessel for all your taco needs comes together in under an hour, depending on how long you let your dough rest. For best result, cook tortillas in a cast iron pan until dark spots appear. (Photo: The New York Times)