You are stood in the wrap aisle of a supermarket holding two packets, one labeled “burrito size” and one labeled “fajita”, and neither of them looks anything like the thing that came off the press at Chipotle last Tuesday. The one you bought last time cracked down the middle the moment you folded it. Half a pound of rice ended up on the worktop.
So the question is a practical one. What is Chipotle actually using, how big is it, who bakes it, and can you get hold of the same thing? The honest answers are: a very large soft flour tortilla with a short ingredient list, roughly the size of a dinner plate, baked by outside commercial tortilla bakeries to Chipotle’s specification, and no, you cannot buy them. But you can get extremely close, and most of the gap has nothing to do with the tortilla at all.
Chipotle uses two families of tortilla. Flour tortillas, which come in a big burrito size and a small taco size, and corn tortillas, which turn up as crispy taco shells and as the raw material for the chips. Both were reformulated in the mid-2010s down to a handful of ingredients, and neither is made inside the restaurant. If you are here because you are costing out a homemade version, the Chipotle nutrition calculator will show you exactly how much of a burrito’s total the tortilla accounts for, which is the number that surprises most people.
What follows is everything that is actually verifiable about the tortillas, clearly separated from the parts that are not. Chipotle publishes its ingredient lists and its nutrition data. It does not publish tortilla dimensions, and it does not publish a supplier list. Anyone who tells you the exact brand name printed on the box in the back of your local store is guessing, and I am not going to do that here.
The burrito tortilla alone carries a serious share of the meal’s calories and carbohydrate. Build your usual order in the Chipotle nutrition calculator and toggle between a burrito and a bowl to see the difference in one click.
What this guide covers
Twelve sections, in the order most people need them. The recipe is section nine if you want to skip straight there.
The short answer: large soft flour tortillas, baked to spec by outside bakeries
Chipotle’s burrito is built on a single large soft flour tortilla. It is thin, very pliable, pale, and noticeably bigger than almost anything sold as a “wrap” in a British or American supermarket. It arrives at the restaurant already made, in stacked plastic sleeves, from commercial tortilla bakeries working to a recipe Chipotle specifies. Nobody in the building is rolling dough.
Alongside that sits a much smaller flour tortilla for soft tacos, a crispy corn tortilla for crunchy tacos, and corn tortillas that get cut into triangles, fried and salted to become the chips. If you have ever wondered what Chipotle chips are made of, the answer starts with the same corn tortilla that goes into a taco order, just treated very differently.
Three things are worth fixing in your head before we go further, because most of the confusion online comes from mixing them up.
The recipe is public
Chipotle has stated its flour tortillas are made from flour, water, canola oil, salt and yeast. Corn tortillas for chips are corn masa flour and water. That is the company’s own published position, not a rumor.
The dimensions are not
Chipotle does not publish tortilla diameters anywhere in its nutrition or allergen material. The sizes quoted everywhere online are measurements people have taken themselves. Treat them as approximate.
The supplier is not either
No single national tortilla supplier is named on Chipotle’s site or in its investor filings. That is normal for a chain of this size, and the reason is covered in section six.
One more thing that matters more than any of the above. The tortilla you eat at Chipotle and the tortilla that came out of the bakery are not quite the same object. Between them sits about twenty seconds on a hot flat press, and that step does more for the texture than the recipe does. If you only take one thing from this article, take that one. It is section seven.
What each menu item is built on
Burritos use the large flour tortilla, one per burrito, folded in the classic envelope shape and then rolled tight in foil. Tacos come three to an order and you choose your shell: soft flour, soft corn or crispy corn. Quesadillas are flour, always. Bowls, obviously, use none, which is the entire point of them and the reason the bowl exists as a menu category at all.
Salads are the same story as bowls. And the chips, along with the base of the chip-adjacent items, come from corn tortillas that are cut and fried in the restaurant rather than arriving as finished potato chips. That last point genuinely does happen in store, which makes chips one of the few things on the line that gets built from a raw component on site. For the full spread of what is available, our guide to what Chipotle has on the menu walks the whole line item by item.
Are Chipotle tortillas made in the restaurant? No, and there are good reasons
This is the single most common misconception, and it is an understandable one. Chipotle has spent two decades telling people it cooks food in its kitchens: it grills the steak and chicken on site, it makes the guacamole by hand every day, it fries its own chips, it cooks the rice in the building. So people reasonably assume the tortillas follow the same pattern.
They do not. Tortillas are delivered pre-made. The restaurant’s job is to store them, warm them and use them.
Three practical reasons explain why, and they are worth understanding because they also explain what you can and cannot replicate.
Space. A Chipotle kitchen is small and every square foot behind the line is already spoken for. Rolling and cooking several hundred twelve-inch tortillas a day needs a dough mixer, a bench, a proving area, a comal or rotary oven, and somewhere to cool and stack them. None of that fits behind a serving line built for throughput.
Volume. A busy store gets through an enormous number of tortillas across a lunch rush. Making them fresh would mean either producing them hours in advance, at which point they are no longer fresh in any meaningful sense, or holding up the line while somebody rolls dough. Neither works.
Consistency. A hand-rolled tortilla varies in thickness and diameter. On a line where the same burrito is supposed to weigh roughly the same in Denver and in Dallas, and where the fold has to work every time for a person who has been trained for a week, an inconsistent tortilla is a genuine operational problem. Machine-made tortillas are identical, and identical is what a chain needs.
What does happen in store
Warming. That is it, and it is not a trivial step. Before your burrito is built, the tortilla goes onto a flat heated press for a short blast, usually somewhere in the region of fifteen to thirty seconds depending on the equipment and how the store runs it. It comes off soft, warm, slightly puffed in places and dramatically more foldable than it went on.
Watch the person building your burrito next time. The tortilla goes on the press first, before they even ask what you want in it, and it sits there while you order your rice and beans. That timing is deliberate. A cold tortilla straight from the sleeve will crack when you fold it. A pressed one will not.
If a member of staff hands you a tortilla that has clearly not been warmed, say something. It happens in a rush, and the difference between a warmed tortilla and an unwarmed one is the difference between a burrito that survives the drive home and one that leaks through the foil.
The corn tortillas for crispy tacos are treated differently again. They arrive as shells or are crisped in store depending on format, and they are brittle by design. You are not folding those, you are filling them and eating them fast. Anyone who has tried to carry three crispy corn tacos to a parking lot knows exactly what I mean.
How big are Chipotle tortillas, and what does an extra one cost?
Chipotle does not publish tortilla dimensions. It publishes calories, macronutrients and allergens, and it publishes ingredient lists, but nowhere in its official material will you find a diameter in inches. Every figure you have read online, including the ones in this section, comes from people measuring them or from foodservice norms rather than from the company.
With that stated plainly, here is what is reliable. The burrito tortilla is around twelve to thirteen inches across. It is the largest thing most people encounter on a fast casual menu and it is meaningfully bigger than a standard supermarket “large” wrap, which is often ten inches and sometimes eight. The taco flour tortilla is small, in the region of six inches. Crispy corn shells are smaller still.
The calorie figures, which are published, back this up neatly. A burrito tortilla is four times the calories of a taco tortilla, which is roughly what you would expect from the difference in area between a thirteen-inch round and a six-inch one.
| Tortilla | Used for | Approx. size (not published by Chipotle) | Calories | Carbs | Sodium |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Flour tortilla (burrito) | All burritos, and the base of the full-size quesadilla | Around 12–13 in | 320 | 50 g | 600 mg |
| Flour tortilla (taco) | Soft flour tacos, kids’ items | Around 6 in | 80 | 13 g | 160 mg |
| Crispy corn tortilla | Crunchy tacos | Around 5–6 in | 70 | 10 g | 0 mg |
| Soft corn tortilla | Soft corn tacos, where offered | Around 6 in | Check current menu | Check current menu | Check current menu |
Nutrition figures above are from Chipotle’s own published US nutrition data and are per tortilla. They get updated, so treat them as current-ish rather than eternal, and confirm anything you are relying on. The soft corn option is not broken out on every printed menu sheet, which is why I have left it blank rather than filled it in with a number I cannot source.
The quesadilla question
This one is genuinely murky and I would rather say so than invent an answer. The kids’ quesadilla is built on the small taco-size flour tortilla, which matches its published calorie count exactly. The full-size adult quesadilla, added to the main menu more recently, is built on a flour tortilla that is folded rather than left flat, and the most sensible reading of the nutrition data is that it uses the large burrito tortilla. I have seen confident claims online for a dedicated mid-size quesadilla tortilla and I have not been able to verify any of them. If a specific size matters to you, ask in store.
Ordering a tortilla on the side
You can order a plain tortilla as an add-on, and a great many people do. The classic move is to order a burrito bowl, which is generally packed more generously than a burrito because the fold does not constrain it, then add a tortilla on the side and build your own burrito at the table. Whether it genuinely gets you more food is arguable and depends heavily on who is serving you.
It used to be free. Chipotle started charging for the side tortilla in October 2020, initially at 25 cents, specifically to close that loophole. Today it typically runs somewhere in the region of 25 to 50 cents depending on the market, and like everything else on the menu it varies by location, so check your local pricing rather than trusting a number in an article. If you are pricing up a full order, our guides to how much a Chipotle burrito costs and how much a Chipotle bowl costs break down the current ranges.
Worth knowing: the side tortilla is usually warmed too, but not always, and if it is going in a bag for later it will stiffen as it cools. If you are planning to build at home, ask for it unpressed and warm it yourself. It will be better.
What is in a Chipotle tortilla, and what changed when they reformulated it
Here is the part that is properly documented, because Chipotle made a great deal of noise about it at the time and the announcement is still sitting on the company’s newsroom.
The flour tortilla is made from flour, water, canola oil, salt and yeast. The corn tortillas that become chips are corn masa flour and water. The corn tortillas used for tacos add lime, meaning the mineral used in nixtamalisation rather than the citrus fruit, which is a distinction worth making because a surprising number of people read that ingredient list and picture a wedge of lime.
That is a genuinely short list by commercial tortilla standards. A typical shelf-stable supermarket flour tortilla runs to eleven, fourteen, sometimes more ingredients, and the extras are doing real work: dough conditioners to make the dough machine-friendly, preservatives and mold inhibitors to give it a shelf life measured in weeks, acidity regulators, emulsifiers, sometimes added color. Take those out and you get a better tortilla that goes stale faster and is harder to manufacture. That trade-off is the whole story of the reformulation.
What actually happened, and when
The dates get muddled online, so let me lay them out as clearly as the record allows.
Chipotle said the new tortillas took about two years to develop. Public reporting from 2015 onwards described the company working on a radically simplified tortilla, including a documented collaboration with the Bread Lab at Washington State University on tortilla formulation and wheat. That research relationship is real and well covered in regional press.
The simplified tortillas went into US restaurants for testing. This is the period most people mean when they refer to “the 2016 reformulation”, and it is why you will see that date attached to the change even though the finished rollout was announced later.
On 28 March 2017 Chipotle announced that its food contained no added colors, flavors or preservatives, and the tortillas were the last item to get there. The tortilla was, in the company’s telling, the hard one. Everything else had already been cleaned up.
So if you want to be precise: the work spans roughly 2015 to 2017, the testing was 2016, and the completed change was announced in spring 2017. Calling it “the 2016 reformulation” is close enough for conversation and slightly wrong on paper.
Why people noticed
Reactions were mixed, and it is worth being honest about that rather than treating the change as an unqualified improvement. Removing dough conditioners changes how a tortilla behaves. Conditioners make dough more extensible and more forgiving, and they help a tortilla stay soft and foldable for longer after baking. Strip them out and the tortilla gets a shorter useful window, is a bit less stretchy, and is somewhat more prone to tearing if it is handled cold.
Some regular customers reported tortillas that tore more easily after the change. Others said they tasted noticeably more like actual bread. Both of those observations are consistent with what happened to the recipe, and neither is really disputable. It was a deliberate trade: fewer additives in exchange for a slightly more temperamental product, backed by a supply chain and a warming step designed to hide the difference.
This also explains something readers ask constantly. If Chipotle tortillas have no preservatives, why do they last in the fridge when you take one home? They do not, particularly. A side tortilla taken home will be noticeably stiffer the next day and stale by day three. That is the recipe working as intended, not a bad batch.
The bits nobody publishes
Chipotle publishes the ingredient list. It does not publish the ratios, the flour specification, the protein content of that flour, the hydration level of the dough, the fermentation time or the bake temperature, and those are the variables that actually determine whether a tortilla is any good. Two bakeries working from the same five-ingredient list can produce very different tortillas. That is not a criticism of Chipotle, it is just how baking works, and it is worth remembering when someone online claims to have “the exact Chipotle recipe”. They have five ingredients everyone already has. The recipe is in the numbers.
Flour versus corn at Chipotle, and the gluten question
The split is simple. Flour tortillas carry the burritos, the quesadillas and the soft flour tacos. Corn tortillas carry the crispy tacos, the soft corn tacos and, in cut and fried form, the chips. There is no wholemeal option, no low-carb option, no spinach or tomato wrap, and no gluten-free flour tortilla. Chipotle has kept the tortilla range deliberately narrow, which is consistent with how the whole menu works. Our piece on what Chipotle is gets into why the chain runs such a short ingredient list overall.
Which one should you actually pick?
For a burrito, you have no choice. For tacos, it matters more than people think.
Flour
Softer, more neutral, holds more filling without splitting, easier to eat while walking. It also adds more calories and carbohydrate per shell than either corn option. If you want your taco to behave like a small burrito, this is the one.
Corn
More flavor of its own, lower in calories, and in crispy form it gives you texture the flour tortilla cannot. It also breaks. Crispy corn shells split under a heavy load of rice and salsa, and soft corn tortillas are smaller and less forgiving to fold.
A reasonable default that most regulars land on eventually: crispy corn for the first taco because the texture is the point, soft flour for the other two because you actually want to finish them without a fork. That is folklore rather than policy, but it holds up.
Gluten, and the caveat that matters
This part needs care, because it is the one where getting it wrong has consequences for somebody.
Chipotle’s flour tortillas contain wheat and therefore gluten. The company’s own allergen guidance is blunt about it: if you avoid gluten, do not eat the flour tortillas. Corn tortillas are made from corn masa rather than wheat, so they do not contain gluten as an ingredient.
But “does not contain gluten as an ingredient” is not the same claim as “safe for coeliac disease”, and Chipotle does not make the second claim. Two separate issues sit underneath it.
First, the field. Chipotle states that items containing corn, including the corn tortillas used for chips and crispy tacos and the corn salsa, may have trace amounts of gluten from co-mingling with gluten-containing grains in the field. That is an agricultural reality, not a kitchen one, and it is outside the restaurant’s control.
Second, the line. A Chipotle serving line is a shared prep environment. Staff move between containers, gloves touch multiple items, and flour tortillas are handled at the same station as everything else. Chipotle will change gloves at the start of your order if you ask, and if you are highly gluten sensitive you should ask. But a shared line cannot be a guarantee, and nobody should treat it as one.
If you have coeliac disease rather than a preference for eating less gluten, the practical answer is a bowl with no tortilla, ordered with a glove change, with a clear-eyed understanding that this reduces risk rather than removing it. That is not a Chipotle-specific limitation, it applies to essentially every assembly-line restaurant. The vegetarian options guide deals with the parallel version of this problem for meat-free eaters, where shared utensils raise the same kind of question.
Where does Chipotle get its tortillas? An honest answer
Short version: from commercial tortilla bakeries, more than one of them, and Chipotle does not publicly name them.
I want to be direct about this because the internet is full of confident answers to this question and most of them are unsourced. There is no page on chipotle.com listing a tortilla supplier. There is nothing in the company’s investor material naming one. Searching turns up a lot of pages that assert a brand name and cite nothing, and at least some of those appear to be repeating each other.
What we can say with confidence is structural, and it is more useful than a brand name would be anyway.
A chain this size does not use one bakery. With more than four thousand restaurants, almost all in the United States, tortillas have to arrive fresh across a continent. Tortillas are heavy, bulky and perishable, especially preservative-free ones. Shipping every tortilla from a single plant would be slow and expensive. Regional production, feeding regional distribution centers, is how this is done across foodservice.
Suppliers change. Contracts get renewed, renegotiated and lost. A supplier that was accurate in 2018 may not be accurate now. This is one reason chains rarely publish supplier lists: the list would be wrong within a year, and it hands competitors and negotiators information they would rather not give away.
The spec is the thing that travels, not the bakery. Chipotle sets the ingredient list, the dimensions, the weight and the tolerances. Any approved bakery producing to that spec makes a Chipotle tortilla. This is why the tortilla in Portland tastes like the tortilla in Philadelphia even if they came out of different ovens.
What we do know about the development side
The one publicly documented partnership worth knowing about is not a supplier at all. Chipotle worked with the Bread Lab, a grain and baking research program run by Washington State University, on tortilla development during the reformulation period. Regional and national press covered it at the time, including work on wheat varieties and on getting a short-ingredient tortilla to behave properly at commercial scale.
That is a research collaboration, not a manufacturing one. The Bread Lab did not become Chipotle’s tortilla factory. And I would stop short of claiming the tortilla you eat today is the exact formulation that came out of that work, because the company has not said so and I have not seen it documented. What the story does tell you is that the reformulation was a serious technical project rather than a marketing exercise, which is consistent with it taking two years.
If you want the current answer rather than mine, ask in store. Staff can often see the box. Whether they are supposed to tell you is another matter, and one manager’s answer is not a national policy, but it is a more reliable route than any article including this one. Chipotle’s official customer channels are the route if you want something on the record.
Why Chipotle tortillas taste better than the ones in your cupboard
People search this constantly, usually phrased as some version of “why are Chipotle tortillas so good”, and the answers online tend to be vague gestures at freshness and quality ingredients. The real answer is more specific and considerably more useful, because you can act on it tonight.
It is mostly the press.
What the warming step actually does
A tortilla straight out of a sealed bag is a cold, slightly stiff, faintly rubbery disc. Its starches are set. Its surface moisture has migrated inward and equalised. Fold it and it will crease into a permanent line, then crack along that line under load.
Put that same tortilla on a hot dry surface for fifteen to thirty seconds a side and several things happen at once. The starches soften and the whole thing becomes pliable, so it will fold without a hard crease. Trapped moisture flashes to steam, which is what produces those small blisters and pockets you see on a Chipotle tortilla. The surface picks up a very slight toast, which is a real flavor change rather than a cosmetic one. And the tortilla becomes warm, which affects perceived flavor more than most people credit.
None of that is a Chipotle secret. It is what every taqueria in the world does, and it is what the tortilla is designed to have done to it. The reason a supermarket wrap eaten cold from the packet is disappointing is not really that it is a bad tortilla. It is that you have eaten it in an unfinished state.
Cold from the bag
Stiff, creases permanently, cracks at the fold, tastes floury and slightly flat, holds maybe half the filling before it splits. This is the version most people judge tortillas by.
Thirty seconds on a hot pan
Soft, drapes over your hand, folds without cracking, faintly toasted, blistered in spots, and will hold a genuinely heavy load. Same tortilla. Completely different product.
The other factors, in order of how much they matter
After the press, the next biggest factor is size. A thirteen-inch tortilla lets you fold a proper double-tucked envelope with real overlap. A ten-inch one does not, and no amount of technique fixes that. Then the fold itself, then the foil, which steams the whole parcel gently on the way to you and keeps it pliable. Then, some way down the list, the recipe.
That ordering is worth sitting with if you are trying to reproduce this at home, because it means your money and effort are best spent on a bigger tortilla and a hot pan rather than on hunting for a magic brand. Our full guide to making a Chipotle burrito at home covers the fold and the foil in detail, and the tortilla advice here is designed to sit alongside it.
How to do the warming step at home
You do not need a tortilla press or any special kit. A dry frying pan is fine, and cast iron is better than nonstick because it holds heat when a cold tortilla lands on it.
Medium to medium-high, dry, given two or three minutes to come up to an even temperature. Oil will fry the surface and make it greasy rather than pliable. A drop of water should skitter, not sit.
Lay the tortilla flat, leave it alone, flip when you see the first pale blisters lift. Both sides. If it is browning hard or going crisp at the edges, your pan is too hot and you have gone past pliable into cracker.
This is the step people skip and it matters as much as the heating. Stacked warm tortillas steam each other and stay soft. A warmed tortilla left alone on a worktop will stiffen again within a couple of minutes.
The pliability window is short. Have your fillings ready before you start warming, not after. This is exactly why Chipotle presses the tortilla at the front of the line rather than at the end.
A gas hob works too and gives you better blistering: tortilla straight onto the grate over a medium flame, a few seconds a side, moved with tongs. Faster and slightly more dramatic. Watch it constantly, because the margin between blistered and burnt is about two seconds.
Can you buy Chipotle tortillas? No, and here is what to buy instead
You cannot buy Chipotle-branded tortillas. They are not sold in supermarkets, they are not sold on Chipotle’s website, and there is no retail line. The company sells food in its restaurants and merchandise online, and tortillas are not merchandise.
Two caveats worth knowing. First, you can buy a single tortilla in-store as a side item, which is the only legitimate way to walk out with one, and at 25 to 50 cents or so it is a cheap way to compare against whatever you have at home. Second, and this trips people up constantly: there are plenty of supermarket products with “chipotle” in the name, chipotle-flavored wraps, chipotle-seasoned tortillas, and none of them have anything to do with the restaurant. Chipotle is a smoked jalapeno pepper before it is a chain, and those products are named after the pepper, not the restaurant.
What to look for on the shelf instead
This is the genuinely useful part, and it is a list of properties rather than brands, because brand availability differs by country, region and shop, and a brand recommendation would be wrong for most readers.
Size first: twelve inches or larger. This is non-negotiable and it is the single biggest determinant of whether your burrito holds. Look for packets described as “burrito size”, “burrito grande”, “extra large” or with a stated diameter of 12 in or 30 cm and up. Ten-inch tortillas make a burrito that has to be eaten with a fork.
A short ingredient list. Flour, water, oil, salt, sometimes yeast or a raising agent. The closer you get to that, the closer you are to the Chipotle spec. Long lists are not automatically bad, and dough conditioners genuinely do make tortillas more forgiving, but they also tend to come with a faintly synthetic aftertaste when the tortilla is eaten warm.
Softness in the packet. Squeeze the pack. It should feel supple, not board-stiff. Stiff in the packet means stiff on the plate, and no amount of warming fully rescues a tortilla that was dry when you bought it.
Fresh or chilled beats ambient, usually. Tortillas from the chilled cabinet or a bakery section tend to be softer and better flavored than long-life ones from a shelf. They also go off faster, which is the same trade Chipotle made.
A tortilleria if you have one. If there is a Mexican grocer or a local tortilla bakery within reach, their large flour tortillas will comfortably beat anything in a supermarket. Buy them the day you need them, because fresh ones stale quickly.
One more practical note. Buy more than you think you need and freeze the rest. Large flour tortillas freeze extremely well if you separate them with greaseproof paper, and defrosting one and pressing it is far better than making do with a small one because the big packet ran out.
How to make Chipotle-style flour tortillas at home
If you want to go all the way, making them is not hard. It is fiddly the first time and easy by the third. The recipe below is built to match the published Chipotle ingredient list, which means flour, water, oil, salt and yeast, with quantities and technique filled in because those are the parts nobody publishes.
Two honest warnings before you start. Rolling a twelve-inch round thin enough is the hard part and your first few will be lopsided, which does not matter for taste. And you will need about two hours, most of it resting time you can ignore.
Ingredients (makes six large tortillas, roughly 12 inches)
The dough
500 g (about 4 cups) plain or all-purpose flour
10 g (2 tsp) fine salt
5 g (1½ tsp) instant yeast
60 ml (¼ cup) neutral oil, ideally rapeseed or canola
300–320 ml (about 1¼ cups) warm water
Kit
A mixing bowl, a rolling pin, a dry heavy frying pan or cast iron skillet, a clean tea towel. A bench scraper helps. A tortilla press does not, because a press cannot make a tortilla this thin or this wide.
On the flour: plain or all-purpose is right. Bread flour makes a chewier tortilla that fights the rolling pin and springs back. Wholemeal makes a drier, more brittle one. If you want to use some wholemeal, cap it at about a quarter of the total and add a splash more water.
On the yeast: Chipotle’s list includes yeast, so this recipe does too, but its job here is flavor and a little softness rather than a proper rise. Leave it out and you get a perfectly good tortilla that tastes slightly plainer. Do not expect the dough to double.
Method
Whisk the flour, salt and yeast together in a large bowl so the salt is evenly distributed. Pour in the oil and rub it through with your fingertips until the flour looks faintly damp and sandy. Doing the fat before the water gives you a more tender tortilla, because you are coating some of the flour and limiting gluten development.
Warm, not hot. Blood temperature. Add about 300 ml first and mix with a hand or a wooden spoon until it forms a shaggy mass, then add the rest only if there are dry patches left in the bowl. The dough should be soft and slightly tacky, definitely not stiff. A stiff dough will not roll thin.
On a lightly floured surface, by hand, until it is smooth and springs back slowly when you press it. It will go from ragged to satiny somewhere around the five-minute mark. A stand mixer with a dough hook on low will do it in four or five, but this quantity is easy by hand.
Cover the bowl with a damp cloth or a plate and leave it somewhere warm-ish. This is not a proof, it is a relaxation. The gluten you just built needs to slacken or the dough will fight you at the rolling stage and shrink back every time you lift the pin.
Six pieces of roughly 145 g each. Roll each into a tight smooth ball by cupping your hand over it and moving it in circles against the worktop. Cover and rest a second time for at least 20 minutes, ideally 30. Do not skip this. The second rest is the difference between a tortilla that rolls to 12 inches and one that stubbornly stops at nine.
Lightly flour the surface. Flatten a ball with your palm, then roll from the center outward, turning the disc a quarter turn between passes to keep it round. Aim for 30 cm across and about 2 mm thick. You should be able to see the shadow of your hand through it. If it shrinks back, walk away for five minutes and come back to it.
Medium-high, no oil, properly preheated. Lay it flat, leave it alone. Bubbles will start lifting across the surface within about twenty seconds. Flip, cook the other side, and look for pale golden freckles rather than an even brown. Any hard browning means the pan is too hot.
Every tortilla goes onto the pile and the towel goes back over. They steam each other soft. Left uncovered they will be leathery in ten minutes. Roll the next one while the current one cooks and the whole batch takes about twenty minutes.
Storing them: once completely cool, into an airtight bag. Two days at room temperature, a week in the fridge though they stiffen, three months in the freezer with paper between them. Every one of those needs the pan again before use. A fridge-cold homemade tortilla is worse than a supermarket one until you reheat it.
Troubleshooting the recipe
If the dough will not roll out, it has not rested long enough. That accounts for most first-attempt failures. If the tortillas come out crisp rather than soft, your pan is too hot or you cooked them too long: thirty seconds is genuinely enough. If they taste bland, you are probably under-salting, and two teaspoons per 500 g of flour is not a lot. If they come out thick and bready, you did not roll them thin enough, and thin is the whole game.
Once you have the tortilla sorted, the rest of the burrito is a matter of assembly and ratio, and that is covered properly in the copycat burrito guide. If you are chasing the meat side too, our breakdown of the steak Chipotle uses gets into the cut and the marinade, which is the other component people get wrong.
What the tortilla costs you nutritionally
Here is the number that reframes the whole menu for a lot of people. The burrito tortilla, on its own, before a single grain of rice goes in, is around 320 calories, 50 grams of carbohydrate, 9 grams of fat and 600 milligrams of sodium.
That is not a small addition. It is comparable to a serving of white rice and a serving of black beans put together. On a burrito that lands somewhere around 1,000 to 1,300 calories depending on how you build it, the tortilla is roughly a quarter to a third of the total, and it contributes more sodium than several of the fillings do.
This is the entire reason the burrito bowl exists as a menu item, and why it is the default choice for anyone tracking anything. Order your usual burrito as a bowl, change nothing else, and you have removed 320 calories and 50 grams of carbohydrate without giving up any filling. There is no other single swap on the Chipotle menu that does that much.
| Choice | Tortilla calories added | Carbs added | Sodium added | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Burrito | 320 | 50 g | 600 mg | One large flour tortilla |
| Bowl or salad | 0 | 0 g | 0 mg | Same fillings, no shell |
| Bowl + side tortilla | 320 | 50 g | 600 mg | Identical to a burrito, plus the side charge |
| Three soft flour tacos | 240 | 39 g | 480 mg | Three small tortillas at 80 cal each |
| Three crispy corn tacos | 210 | 30 g | 0 mg | Lowest sodium shell option by a distance |
The sodium column is the one most people have never looked at. Crispy corn tortillas carry no listed sodium at all, while three flour tacos bring 480 mg before you have added anything. If you are watching salt rather than calories, the shell is a bigger lever than the protein.
To see how this plays out across a real order rather than in isolation, build yours in the Chipotle nutrition calculator, and our full breakdown of how many calories are in a Chipotle covers the rest of the line. If you want an outside comparison, the equivalent numbers at CAVA are worth a look, since its pitas carry a different profile again: our CAVA calories guide sets them side by side.
Worth saying plainly: none of this makes the tortilla bad. It is bread. Bread has calories. The argument that Chipotle is unhealthy usually collapses on inspection into an argument about portion size and about how many high-calorie extras you stacked on, which is a discussion we have had at length in is Chipotle healthy. The tortilla is just the most visible single item you can subtract.
When your burrito falls apart: the practical troubleshooting
Every failure mode has a cause, and almost all of them are fixable. Here is what actually goes wrong, in rough order of frequency.
It cracked along the fold
The tortilla was too cold. This is the number one cause and it is nearly always the answer when a homemade burrito splits at the seam rather than at a corner. A cold tortilla creases rather than curves, and a crease is a fault line. Warm it, use it within two minutes, and the problem disappears.
Secondary cause: the tortilla was stale. Preservative-free tortillas, including good fresh ones from a tortilleria, dry out fast and a dry tortilla will crack no matter how you heat it. Heat rescues a tortilla that has stiffened, it does not rescue one that has genuinely dried.
It burst at the end
Overfilled, or filled too far toward one end. A burrito needs a clear margin of empty tortilla at both ends to fold in, and if the filling reaches the edge those tucks have nothing to grip. The rule of thumb: filling in a log across the lower third, at least two inches of clear tortilla at each end, and a clear band along the far edge.
If you consistently overfill, the tortilla is probably too small rather than the filling too generous. Twelve inches minimum, and thirteen is better.
It leaked
Wet fillings, usually salsa, going in loose rather than sitting on top of something absorbent. The order matters. Rice at the bottom, then beans, then protein, then wet things, then cheese and lettuce last. Rice is doing structural work as much as flavor work: it absorbs the liquid that would otherwise sit against the tortilla and soften it into a hole.
This is also why a burrito eaten twenty minutes after it was made is more fragile than one eaten immediately, and why the foil matters. Which is a good moment to say: keep it in the foil and peel it down as you eat. That is not fussiness, the foil is structural.
The fold will not hold
Chipotle’s fold is a specific sequence and it is worth learning properly rather than improvising. Filling in a line, fold the near edge up and over the filling, tuck it back to compress, fold both ends in, then roll forward keeping tension the whole way. The compression step before the ends go in is the bit most people miss, and it is what makes the difference between a tight cylinder and a loose parcel that sags.
Watching it happen is faster than reading about it, and if you are in a store, watch the person building it rather than your phone. Our guide to ordering at Chipotle covers what to ask for at each stage, including how to get a burrito built in a way that is more likely to survive.
One thing you cannot fix: a double wrap. Chipotle will sometimes add a second tortilla around a heavily loaded burrito, at some locations for a charge and at others as a courtesy when the order is large. It is not a formal national menu option, it varies by store, and asking politely is the only way to find out. If you get it, that is another 320 calories, which is worth knowing before you say yes.
Is a tortilla actually Mexican?
Since we are on the subject, the giant flour burrito wrapped in foil is a northern Mexican and American border-region format rather than a national Mexican dish, and the very large flour tortilla in particular is much more common in the north of Mexico and the southwestern United States than it is further south. That is a longer discussion than it belongs here, and we have had it in is Chipotle Mexican food.
Questions people actually ask
What tortillas does Chipotle use?
Chipotle uses large soft flour tortillas for burritos and quesadillas, small flour tortillas for soft tacos, and corn tortillas for crispy tacos and for the chips. The flour tortillas are made from flour, water, canola oil, salt and yeast, and the corn tortillas used for chips are corn masa flour and water. None of them are made inside the restaurant. They arrive pre-made from commercial tortilla bakeries producing to Chipotle’s specification, and the only step that happens in store is warming them on a flat press before your order is built.
Does Chipotle make their own tortillas?
No. Chipotle cooks a great deal in its restaurants, including the meat, the rice and the guacamole, and it fries its own chips, but tortillas arrive already made from outside bakeries. There are three practical reasons: a Chipotle kitchen has no space for a dough bench and oven, the volume during a lunch rush would be impossible to keep up with, and a chain needs every tortilla to be the same size and thickness so the fold works identically in every store. What does happen in store is the warming press.
How big are Chipotle tortillas?
Chipotle does not publish tortilla dimensions anywhere in its official nutrition or allergen material, so every figure online is someone’s own measurement. The generally reported size for the burrito tortilla is around twelve to thirteen inches across, which is noticeably larger than a standard supermarket large wrap at eight to ten inches. The taco flour tortilla is much smaller at roughly six inches, and crispy corn shells are smaller again. The published calorie figures support this, since the burrito tortilla is four times the calories of the taco one.
What size tortilla should I buy to make a Chipotle-style burrito?
Twelve inches at minimum, and thirteen if you can find it. This is the single most important factor in whether your burrito holds together, and it matters more than the brand or the ingredient list. Look for packets described as burrito size, burrito grande or extra large, or with a stated diameter of 12 inches or 30 centimetres upwards. A ten-inch tortilla will not give you enough clear margin at the ends to fold properly, which means the parcel sags and bursts under a standard filling load.
Where does Chipotle get their tortillas?
From commercial tortilla bakeries producing to Chipotle’s own specification. The company does not publicly name a supplier, and there is no supplier list on its website or in its investor material, so anyone naming a specific brand is guessing. With over four thousand restaurants and preservative-free tortillas that do not travel well, regional production feeding regional distribution is almost certainly how it works. Suppliers also change over time as contracts turn over, which is one reason chains of this size rarely publish that information at all.
What brand of tortillas does Chipotle use?
There is no consumer brand on a Chipotle tortilla. They are produced under contract to Chipotle’s specification rather than being an off-the-shelf branded product, so the box in the back of the store does not correspond to anything you can buy. Several websites confidently name a brand, but none of them cite a source, and Chipotle itself has never published one. If you want a current answer, asking a manager in store is more reliable than any article, though one store’s answer is not a national policy.
Can you buy Chipotle tortillas in a shop?
No. There is no retail line of Chipotle tortillas, they are not stocked in supermarkets, and they are not sold on the company’s website. The only legitimate way to get one is to order a tortilla on the side in a restaurant as an add-on item. Be careful with search results here, because plenty of supermarket products carry the word chipotle in the name, referring to the smoked jalapeno pepper rather than the restaurant chain, and those have no connection to Chipotle at all.
How much is a tortilla at Chipotle?
A tortilla on the side is a paid add-on. Chipotle started charging for it in October 2020, at 25 cents initially, specifically to close the loophole where people ordered a bowl and built their own burrito for less. Today it typically runs somewhere between about 25 and 50 cents depending on the market, and like all Chipotle pricing it varies by location, so check your own store rather than relying on a national figure. Some stores will also charge separately for a second tortilla used as a double wrap.
Why are Chipotle tortillas so good?
Mostly the press, not the recipe. Every tortilla goes onto a hot flat surface for fifteen to thirty seconds before your burrito is built, which softens the starches, creates steam blisters, adds a light toast and makes the tortilla far more pliable than it was in the bag. Size helps too, since a thirteen-inch round allows a proper tight fold, and the foil keeps the whole parcel gently steamed on the way to you. You can replicate almost all of it at home with a dry frying pan.
Are Chipotle tortillas gluten free?
The flour tortillas contain wheat and are not gluten free. Chipotle’s own guidance is blunt: if you avoid gluten, do not eat the flour tortillas. Corn tortillas contain no wheat, but Chipotle notes that corn items may carry trace gluten from co-mingling with other grains in the field, and the serving line is a shared prep environment where gloves and utensils touch multiple items. Staff will change gloves at the start of your order if you ask. For coeliac disease, this reduces risk rather than removing it.
How many calories are in a Chipotle tortilla?
The large burrito tortilla is around 320 calories with about 50 grams of carbohydrate, 9 grams of fat and 600 milligrams of sodium. The small flour taco tortilla is around 80 calories with 13 grams of carbohydrate. A crispy corn tortilla is around 70 calories with 10 grams of carbohydrate and no listed sodium. On a burrito totalling somewhere between 1,000 and 1,300 calories, the tortilla alone accounts for roughly a quarter to a third of it, which is precisely why the bowl exists.
How do you make Chipotle-style tortillas at home?
Mix 500 g plain flour with 2 teaspoons of salt and 1 and a half teaspoons of instant yeast, rub in 60 ml of neutral oil, then add roughly 300 ml of warm water and knead for six to eight minutes. Rest the dough 30 to 45 minutes, divide into six balls, then rest again for at least 20 minutes before rolling. That second rest is what lets you roll to twelve inches. Cook 30 to 45 seconds a side in a dry hot pan and stack under a tea towel.
The quick version
Chipotle uses large soft flour tortillas of around twelve to thirteen inches for burritos, small flour tortillas for soft tacos, and corn tortillas for crispy tacos and chips. They are made by outside commercial bakeries to Chipotle’s spec, not in the restaurant, from a short published ingredient list of flour, water, canola oil, salt and yeast. You cannot buy them at retail. Buy the biggest, softest flour tortillas you can find instead, and warm them properly, because the flat press in store is doing more work than the recipe is.
If you are recreating a burrito at home, start with the copycat burrito guide, check the tortilla’s share of the total in the Chipotle nutrition calculator, and read what Chipotle has and what a burrito costs if you are deciding between making it and buying it. There is more in the rest of our Chipotle guides, and a whole library of free calculators on Waldev for everything else.
Nutrition figures, prices and ingredient lists in this article reflect Chipotle’s published US information at the time of writing and can change without notice. Menu availability, tortilla options and side charges vary by location and by country. Chipotle does not publish tortilla dimensions or supplier names, so all sizes given here are approximate and clearly flagged as such. If you have coeliac disease or a serious food allergy, confirm directly with the restaurant before ordering and do not rely on this page.
Allergens and special dietary information, including Chipotle’s statements on wheat, gluten, glove changes and trace gluten in corn products.
Chipotle newsroom, home of the March 2017 announcement on removing added colors, flavors and preservatives, including the tortilla reformulation.
FoodData Central for independent nutrition data on flour and corn tortillas if you want to compare a supermarket product against Chipotle’s figures.
US Food and Drug Administration for the rules behind gluten-free labeling and what a product must meet before it can carry the claim.
