Dough – How to get rid of extra flour on homemade pizza dough and tortillas

Authentic flour tortillas use lard. For an authentic taste, use that, or consider using shortening or butter since they are solid at room temperature like lard. You also might want to consider increasing the fat in your recipe. Fat will coat the proteins of your flour and keep the gluten network from forming so easily.

I was also taught when making tortillas to let the dough rest for an hour after kneading and before rolling/pressing. This helps everything relax.

After cooking each tortilla, put them in a pile with a clean towel over them. The tortillas will sweat liquid, helping them to soften up. You can also put them all in a heat-safe bag (paper or microwave safe plastic) for sweating. When storing your tortillas, make sure to store them in a bag and not in the open air.

If your tortillas are too small, you should be able to roll out a larger piece of dough.

Part of the texture issues might actually be from you rolling them too thin. If you are used to working with dough your ideas of thin might be different from the overstated ones found in recipes. Try rolling to various thicknesses.

Warning: this answer isn't about traditional beignets, but about New Orleans beignets, which are actually made from yeast dough, like donuts. It refers to this recipe which the OP is most likely using.

For yeast dough, the difference between long and short rising times is that longer times give you more flavor development. Beignets are so chock-full of sugar and fat that they don't need the subtle flavoring of long fermentation. They can be made with very short rising times.

I don't know why the recipe tells you to refrigerate overnight and then forgets to tell you that the dough should come back to temperature. There are some rich doughs which are baked from cold in order to hold their shape (brioche and other butter-rich relatives), but due to the physics of deep frying, you don't want fridge-cold dough in your pan. But there is surely no need to get it thoroughly cooled; the recipe is probably advising the long stay for fermentation or convenience reasons, not because you need chilled dough. One possibility which comes to mind is that the soft dough might be a bit hard to roll when warm, but a combination of non-stick mat, clingfilm and flouring usually takes care of that.

If you keep your dough out of the fridge, it will be ready much earlier, and you can fry it as soon as it is properly risen. But because this recipe has such an insanely high yeast ratio (equivalent to 7.5% fresh yeast in baker percentages), you have to watch it closely, it might rise very soon.