Like you, the H-E-B flour tortilla has accepted the fact that it is imperfect. It’s okay with that. That’s part of the reason everyone loves it so much. Its little quirks. Like the lumpy, bumpy, not-quite-circular shape. Some air bubbles here and there. An edge that’s folded over a bit, like a teenage ear awaiting a piercing. These are signs that the precious H-E-B tortilla is homemade. Or as close to homemade as you can get in a 68,000-square-foot grocery store along the Houston interstate.

My half-Mexican, very Tex-Mex mom used to make flour tortillas with an electric press. She’d roll balls of dough made with flour, salt, baking powder, warm water, and Crisco and let them proof into silky balloons under a towel. Then she’d set up an assembly line where my siblings and I would stand to the side while she pressed out the tortilla and then passed it to us. Well, it would have been an assembly line if we’d put them in the kitchen towel instead of eating them one by one. Sometimes we’d slather them with butter and chew them in front of the TV, not knowing how this stupid greasy moment would be one of life’s best.

See what I mean about imperfection? Can relate. Photo by Hayden Spears

When there wasn’t time for that cute glowing family portrait type of cooking, we bought similarly chewy flour tortillas at H-E-B. Our local store had people pressing them out—live! IRL!—right there in the aisle, surrounded by display tables of tortillas. They’d package the tortillas and stack them high in what Little Me thought was a tortilla fort. When you picked up a package, it would be warm and steamy. I’d clutch it to my chest like a heating pad. H-E-B had it all figured out.

In fact, they’d figured it out decades before I even got there. Jorge Elizondo, H-E-B’s VP of Customer Insights, grew up in South Texas with a tortilleria three blocks away. “You would go there to find your flour or corn tortillas and then you'd go to H-E-B to do your grocery shopping,” he said. It was around 40 years ago that some savvy exec noticed the chance to fulfill two customer needs in one store. Now nearly every location—350 throughout the state of Texas and nowhere else—has an in-store tortilleria. (In 2006 H-E-B took it a step further by launching Mi Tienda, a Mexican grocery store with huge piles of dried chiles in the produce department and in-store taquerias. Catch me happily wandering the aisles with an XL foam cup of horchata whenever I’m back in Houston.)