Soft wheat tortillas use wheat instead of masa as the primary ingredient. alone, the tortilla industry (tortillas and their products – tortilla chips, tostada shells and taco shells) has become a US$6 billion a year industry.
The Tortilla Industry Association (TIA) estimates that in the U.S. They have surpassed bagels and muffins, and have now become the number two packaged bread product sold in the U.S (behind sliced bread). In the U.S., tortillas have grown from an "ethnic" to a mainstream food. Tortillas remain a staple food in Mexico and Central America, and have gained popularity and market share elsewhere. Tortillas are now not only made from maize meal, but also from wheat flour home-made and store-bought tortillas are made in many flavors and varieties. Manually operated wooden tortilla presses of the past led to today's industrial tortilla machinery, which can produce up to 60,000 tortillas per hour. Today, personal and industrial (Mexican-style) tortilla-making equipment has facilitated and expedited tortilla making. As such, this wheat flour flatbread tortilla is not to be confused with the Spanish omelette or any other egg based one. Tortilla in Iberian Spanish also means omelette.
Tortilla, from Spanish torta, cake, plus the diminutive -illa, literally means "little cake". Some have even attributed the origin of flour tortillas to Jewish immigrants of the United States. Most specifically, it is credited to regions of Northern & Central California with the first mass-produced flour tortillas having come from flour tortilla factories in metropolitan Los Angeles. Most often it is attributed to Alta California when California was still part of the Mexican Republic. Mexican Americans talk about the flour tortilla having come from the wheat-filled plenty of the United States. In recent times, they have become integral to Mexican American (most notably in the form of a burrito), Mexican-and Tex-Mex-cuisine. It is said by some that flour tortillas originated in the northern Mexican states of Chihuahua, Durango, Sonora and Sinaloa, where the territory is more suited to growing wheat than corn. The flour tortilla is a much more recent invention. The corn tortilla was the principal food of the Aztecs and other Mesoamerican civilizations. The oldest found tortillas date back as far as 10,000 years BCE and were made of native maize with dried kernels.
The word tortilla comes from Spanish meaning "small cake". The flour tortilla is a variant of the corn tortilla.