A Brimly NewsletterRoom Temperature
Thirty-Eight Taco Shells, and I’d Do It Again
A bag of corn flour, an empanada press that finally behaved, and one last goodbye to summer.
September 25, 2026
“Tortillas”— Image courtesy of Brimly
I only ever crave the thing I do not have.
If it is in the fridge, I am not interested. If it is nowhere in the building, I will think about it for three weeks. This has been true my entire adult life and I have made no progress on it whatsoever.
The thing this time was tacos. I had been thinking about them for weeks, and then summer started actually ending, and it became urgent in the way these things do. I wanted to see the season out properly. I wanted one more warm-weather dinner before we all put on cardigans and start talking about squash.
Which meant making the shells, because that is how it works here. Gluten-free, soy-free, gum-free, all three at once, so almost everything gets made from the beginning.
And for years that has meant cassava flour.
Let me tell you about cassava flour and soft taco shells. It sticks. It sticks fast and it sticks to everything, and you find yourself using more oil than you meant to, and then more than that. I would put a ball of dough into my empanada press and it would weld itself to both sides. So I would press them out by hand instead, which is exactly as fun as it sounds. Something always went wrong. Not ruinously, just enough that I never once looked forward to it.
I had been wondering when that particular misery would end.
Image courtesy of Fellipe Ditadi
Why We Don’t Use Xanthan Gum (or Any Gums) at Brimly
Here is where it gets lucky, and I want to be honest that luck is all it was.
I have been working on recipes for next month, and one of them is cornbread. So I went looking for corn flour, expecting a hunt, and discovered it was sitting on a shelf at the Target closest to us the entire time. One bag. Unremarkable packaging. Gluten-free right there on the front.
I scanned it on Fig, which is the app I run everything through before it comes anywhere near this kitchen. All green. Cleared.
And then I turned the bag over, and the recipe on the back was four lines long. Add water. Mix. Divide. Cook on a hot griddle, flipping a couple of times.
That is the whole thing. That is the entire recipe.
So naturally I doubled it on the first attempt, because moderation has never once occurred to me. Thirty-eight taco shells. On a first try. With a flour I had never used before in my life.
In my defense, there is a system. We cook in three-day stretches here, so that some evenings can be evenings instead of another shift. Thirty-eight shells is not excess, it is planning. That is what I told myself at shell number twenty-two and I am sticking with it.
One bowl. One griddle. About an hour, start to finish.
And the dough did not stick. Not to my hands, not to the griddle, and not, gloriously, to the empanada press. I pressed one out expecting the usual fight and it came away clean and round and even. No tearing. No crumbling at the edges. Just right, the way things are supposed to be and so rarely are.
I felt like somebody’s abuela. I am aware I have not earned that. I felt it anyway.
“Eating Simplified”— Image courtesy of Brimly
Three or Less: Eating Simplified
They were the best tacos I have made. Possibly the best I have eaten, though I accept that the woman who made them is not a neutral judge.
I am buying that corn flour for the rest of my life. I have decided. It is a staple now, in the way certain things simply become staples the first time they work.
I will add a little salt to the dough next time. That is my only note. My only note on a recipe with four lines.
It reminds me of what I was saying last week about keeping things plain. I spent years wrestling a difficult flour when there was a simple bag on a shelf ten minutes away doing the job without complaint. I am not going to dwell on that. I am simply going to note that it happened.
The timing is almost rude. Had I found this in June I would have eaten tacos every single week of the summer. I found it in the last days of September instead, which means I will be eating tacos straight through the fall, and I do not care who is in charge of the rules about that.
One more thing before I go. I have noticed that I mostly write here about the things that haunt me. The sieves I do not use, the tin I should not have closed, the label that says guar gum at the very end.
So here is one that went right. I am going to do more of those.
“Sausage & Onion Pizza”— Image courtesy of Brimly
Gluten-Free Sausage & Onion Pizza
There is cornbread coming in October, which is the only reason I was in that aisle to begin with. I went looking for one ingredient for one recipe and walked out having solved something else entirely. There is now a great deal of corn flour in this kitchen and I regret nothing about that.
And I would like to know: what is the ingredient that changed everything for you? The swap that made something possible again. Write and tell me, because I suspect a lot of you have one and I would like to try them all.
Thanks for reading, and see you next Friday.
Write to me at hello@brimly.co. Past issues are archived here.
Stephnie Grace is a recipe developer, editor, and co-founder of Brimly, specializing in gluten-free, soy-free, and gum-free baking. She writes Room Temperature, which lands every Friday.
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Steph writes about what actually happens in a gluten-free kitchen. Sends weekly.
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