When I go to a taco chain such as Taco Bell or Taco Bueno, the shells are light and crispy.
When I buy shells at the store, the shells taste stale and old. And WTF do I need to bake them in the oven? Uhg!
So what gives? Why are fast food chains the only place I can get a decent taco shell? Even the Mom & Pop Mexican joints don’t have good shells.
I haven’t noticed a difference between restaurant crispy corn taco shells and ones you get at the supermarket.
Old El Paso gets multiple high ratings.
Old El Paso is the worst. And the only ones available where I’m at.
Just a WAG, but I suspect a freshness issue. Restaurants go through them fast enough that they don’t have time to get stale.
That would be my guess.
Those boxes of taco shells can sit on the shelf at the supermarket for months. They’re probably at least several weeks old by the time they even get to the store.
I think it’s the recipe. Why else do the directions say to bake them?
I don’t have to do that for a bag of chips.
I believe you bake them to warm up the fat in order to increase flavor. Quite a few Mexican restaurants do this with their chips, trick is to not overbake them until they taste a bit burnt.
Myself I don’t care for the Taco Bell type shells so I can’t say for sure how to reproduce one at home (or would even want to).
I find the ones from Dollar (and a quarter) Tree are quite good.
As to the baking, I’m sure too many shells would be reduced to chips if the shells were packaged crispy from the factory.
A few years ago I bought a tortilla press and trial-and-errored my way to fresh corn tortillas. If you ever want to do this, and I recommend it it’s worth the effort, the secret is to let the dough sit for 30 minutes before you try to press it.
I was initially following the directions on the back of the bag of masa and it didn’t say anything about that step, but it really is crucial. If you don’t do it your tortillas don’t press right and just fall apart in the pan.
Anyways, if you then want them crispy, once you’ve made them just bake them at 350F for 5 minutes. Hang them over two oven rack wires to “taco” them into shape.
I suspect the thickness of the tortilla is the issue here. The commercial brands make theirs thick and undercook them so they don’t break (and if you heat them up in the oven, they get crispier). The mom-n-pop restaurants may or may not be making their own tortillas by hand, and depending on the type of Mexican food they cook, they may not be trying to make their tacos crispy.
I had some success nuking stale corn chips. Apparently the microwave just drove the moisture out, which made them nice and crisp. This might work for the shells.
Ignorance fought! And here I have been toasting the store-bought crispy ones on a cookie sheet all these years, and some of them flop all the way over. Dammit!!
Anyway, I agree the baking is to warm them up to make them taste fresher (because they are probably bordering on stale, if not already there), as well as to make them crispy, which is what one expects. I find the shells themselves only a means to conduit the contents to my mouth, so put a lot more thought into the fillings and toppings.
And, as a compromise between boxed and stale crispy shells, and making your own from masa mix, I suggest trying the fresh, corn taco shells - the soft ones in the plastic bags sold near the boxed crispy ones. They need a bit more “cooking” but the result is a much better taco compared to the crispy shells.
The shelf life of taco shells is actually fairly short. I bought a box yesterday and I always grab a box from the back of the shelf. The sell by date is March 7th. Only 4 ingredients, no preservatives. Course ground corn flour, water, vegetable oil and salt.
I would imagine baking or frying fresh tortillas would be a little difficult because of the water content. I think if I was going to be making a bunch of crispy taco shells, I’d just get fresh tortillas and go from there.
The usual way to do it is to just heat up a shallow pan of oil and fry them, folding them in half during the process.
Unless they’re different than the one I worked at back in 1989, a lot (most?) restaurants have a little jig/gizmo that they can slap a tortilla into and fry it, and it keeps the shape. That’s how mine did taco shells, taco salad shells, those little hard shell bowls for stuff like guacamole, etc… They also just quartered fresh corn tortillas and deep fried those as well for chips.
If we’re talking fast food, Taco bell, Del Taco, etc, definitely aren’t frying up their own tortillas.
Oven baking at 250 F works wonders for lots of stale stuff. Cap’n Crunch, pretzels, Cheetos (real and off-brand), and most any crispy or crunchy junk food or cereal. Spread the goodies out on a cookie sheet, bake for ten minutes, and then let them cool off in an air-tight container.
That’s the way I prefer my hard shell tacos, but they aren’t anything like what they serve at Taco Bell.
I don’t know what Taco Bell does today, but when I worked there in the 1980s, we made our own hard taco shells by frying corn tortillas with a basket that held them in the U shape.
Store bought don’t have to suck, even though they do. You can get perfectly awesome corn tostadas – both thick and thin types – in the ethnic aisle or at the Mexican grocer. The problem is that tostadas are flat and taco shells aren’t flat and aren’t in the Mexican grocer because taco shells aren’t at all Mexican.
While there are Mexican taquitos, those are rolled, and Mexican tacos dorados are actually fried with their contents inside them already (including tacos de aire, strictly speaking, where you put what you want on top).
Damn, I want to go to Mexico and eat something.
Store-bought taco shells out of the box are always stale to me unless I heat them up first. The oven works best but zapping them in the microwave will do in a pinch as well.
Because if you don’t, they taste stale and old. Though again, the microwave should be fine. (Most taco shells have both oven and microwave directions on the packaging.)