As I’ve said before, I don’t have to bake tortilla chips and they don’t taste stale and old. The fast food chains aren’t baking theirs and they taste great.
When I have leftover chips, say I got take-out from a sit down Mexican place and couldn’t eat them, so they sit in a paper bag for a while on the kitchen counter. Or if I get nachos from a place like Taco Bell and they’ve been in the fridge for a day. They are the soft, spongy, and stale the same way a shell is when you take it out of the box. Heating them up makes them taste fresh and crisp again. (Sometimes I also have to add a little dash of salt as well.)
Now you ask, why are tortilla chips crispier right out of the bag? Why aren’t taco shells? I believe it’s because you’re not making tacos out of tortilla chips. Tortilla chips are thin and brittle and break easily. That makes them great for crunch but terrible for a taco. You need a taco shell to be tough enough that you can pick it up and bite into it without the whole thing falling apart.
Think of the Doritos Locos tacos from Taco Bell that have shells reminiscent of a Dorito, but they are so brittle they have to come in a cardboard sleeve to protect them. (And every time I’ve ever eaten one, it falls apart on the first bite anyway, and I have to pick the rest of it out in pieces from the sleeve.)
I’m not sure how Taco Bell and similar Tex-Mex fast food places are able to give you a crunchy taco that doesn’t need to be baked. Maybe it has to do with the way they store them. I haven’t worked there so I couldn’t tell you. It may be the fact that a supermarket taco shell needs to be in a box on a shelf for a while, then you need to take it home and prepare it for home use. A fast food restaurant might get shells that don’t need to sit for very long because they’re going to be used immediately for customers. I can only speculate.
I live in SoCal. The food at Taco Bell , while tasty and cheap, is not authentic.
Authentic is a small soft corn tortilla. I can get great one at the grocery store. Warm them or lightly fry them, add meat (get some flap steak, chop and fry with seaonings), a little shredded cabbage, Then salsa, fresh lime juice, maybe some Queso. Some prefer diced onion and cilantro instead of cabbage and salsa.
Yes, the best, but maybe not worth the time.
At least not in the store–they mostly use ghost kitchens for their cooking, apparently. However, I have wondered if the chains use some special ingredients to make their shells more durable. I joke to my wife that it’s banana fiber (not that I even know that such a thing exists, it just sounds like the kind of crazy thing that might be a secret ingredient). And that might be a corporate secret.
AH HAH! Taco Bell Ingredients Information lists OAT FIBER as an ingredient in their shells!
That’s probably part of the reason why you need to heat them in the oven to remove any staleness. Old El Paso wraps theirs in a thin shrink wrap, and the shell will often poke tiny holes in it that lets humidity in. Also, if you only have Old El Paso available, then the turnover in taco shells is probably not that high.
My opinion is that statements saying hard shells aren’t Mexican are silly, short sighted, and more than a little bit ignorant. The border moved on the Mexicans, they stayed put. It’d didn’t remove their culture, especially that of food. It’s almost certain that the first person to hard fry a shell before filling it was a person of Mexican heritage, and they probably kept doing it until the non-Mexican folks around them noticed because they liked them themselves. Taco Bell did not invent this technology, Mexican-Americans apparently did.
Mmmmmmmm, and that is the divine way to go. My brother calls them “mom tacos”, and I taunt him with pictures when I make them. You can make a variety of textures of them. Leave some of them a little bit leathery, so they’ll never fall apart (my favorite), and fry some others hard enough that people can take their chances with whether they’ll fall apart. If you’re crafty with the tongs, you can even get them to be U shaped instead of V shaped.
Nah. The secret to true crispy taco goodness is to put your meat of choice on a corn tortilla, fold it over, and then deep-fry it. Pull it out once it’s crispy, pour out the excess oil, and add your fixin’s.
Authentic what?
Not authentic Mexican food. But Tex-Mex is a southwestern American cuisine that is inspired by and incorporates Mexican culinary aspects. I think Taco Bell is a pretty good example of offering such food in a quick and cheap form.
Most of the “Mexican” restaurants I’ve eaten at are really Tex-Mex, because that’s what Americans like and want. I’ve been to some pretty authentic Mexican restaurants in the US that bear only a slight resemblance to what you will find at such places, as well as food trucks. And I’ve eaten some good food in Mexico itself that was similar.
That’s not that different from how Jack in the Box makes tacos.
Naturally. Jack in the Box started in San Diego, and deep-fried crispy tacos are a staple of mom-and-pop Mexican restaurants there, though the ones you’ll get at Roberto’s are much better quality than Jack’s version;
https://robertostacoshop.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Robertos_TwoTacos_COMBO-1170x658.jpg
Those look amazing.
n/m – I need a better cite.
Anyhow, the pre-formed shell does seem to be an American innovation by Glen Bell, based on , of course, tacos dorados.
Here’s a source.
Bell had a hamburger and hot dog stand right across the street from a popular Mexican restaurant, and by 1951 he had reverse-engineered the taco and began selling it, including the tacos dorados popular in southern California. But, inspired by the McDonald’s ideas of interchangeable parts made in advance, Bell came up with a new idea. “Glen Bell is credited as coming up with the pre-formed taco shell,” says Walsh. And that turned out to be a turning point for the fast-food industry.
But if you weren’t specifically talking about the preformed shells then, yeah, fried/hard shell tacos a la tacos dorados have been a thing south of the border. They’re not just a Tex-Mex or Cali-Mex thing.
Maybe they’ve changed or maybe I am conditioned to have bad taste, but I grew up eating the taco shells from the supermarket long before I had ever seen a taco chain (think we first got Taco Bell in the mid '90s). They were always fine to me after being heated up a few minutes on a baking sheet. I don’t really purchase those too much anymore or do fast food in general. I might eat tacos at a sit down chain place once every 2-3 years, but the last time I bought some for home they were still alright to me.
No, I’m meaning a pre-formed hard shell. Bell didn’t invent it.
From here:
A page with two pics of two such machines, the second is from 1951:
So, if people were already getting patents for machines to ease frying hard shells by the time Bell had “reverse-engineered” the taco, he didn’t invent the thing. Plus, people in Texas such as my mother had been hard frying taco shells in a pan before anyone heard of Taco Bell.
Also:
This line from that site is the dumbest thing I ever read.
About the only problem I have with that sentence is that they say it’s universal. Universal things are very rare. Hard shell tacos were a very common thing, and easily predate Taco Bell.
But it wasn’t even the most common. Hard shell tacos were an innovation, not the default. Even in the US. I suspect.
Fascinating info. Thanks.
Again, I don’t think that was true. Canned tortillas and a form to fry them date back to the 30s. My mother and her mother fried hard shell tacos at least back in the 50s. They may have been an innovation to some, but they’re older than hell here.
You could buy a whole chicken in a can back then. That doesn’t mean that most chicken dinners came out of a can. As for family anecdotes, my mother’s family from Michigan fried their shells. The California Okies on my father’s side made soft shell tacos.
It doesn’t matter whether or not a Mexican invented or Mr. Bell did. Culinarily, those perfect U-shaped taco shells are not food that you find within the current Mexican borders. I’ve lived in and travelled extensively in Mexico – more than most Mexicans – and had Mexican family. They’re not Mexican culinary tradition, and if you want to find the exception that proves the rule, then yes, at a bar in Creel, Chihuahua, I had a taco that was a literal clone of a Taco Bell taco. When I asked, it was because the gringo tourists liked them.
And yes, fried tortillas are a Mexican culinary thing. I mentioned examples of them in my previous post. Those aren’t what I’m talking about.