But it tastes so good! Toasted and slathered with Irish butter…yum!
That canned bread is real moist; it’s more of a dense cake than a bread. Packaged any other way it’d have to be sold within minutes of leaving the oven or it’d be a dried-out stale mess.
I agree it looks weird. As does cranberry sauce when carefully pushed from the can onto a serving plate bowl with the can’s stiffening ripples still prominent on the side of the cylindrical slug of red goop.
But looks are not freshness and looks are not taste.
Just a few days ago I had a customer at the grocery store ask me if we sold Mexican rice in a can. She said she had a recipe in a coombook that specified it but she hadn’t made it “in 30 years”.
I was around 30 years ago and I can’t ever recall seeing canned rice, so either she was saying 30 years ago and thinking 50 years ago, or it was only available in the most lily-white parts of the country where people thought “tay-cos” were exotic and would’ve needed to chug a gallon of milk after dipping a chip in some Pace mild salsa.
Hehehe, and your post made me dimly remember dealing with canned Spanish rice back when I worked in a grocery store ages ago. I’m almost certain this isn’t the brand I dealt with, but such a thing does still exist:
And I do remember my mother telling a story about trying to get a grocer in Ohio to understand what a tortilla was when she lived there about 65 years ago. She wasn’t successful in explaining it, IIRC.
As others have said, it’s quite good. It’s a molasses-y steamed brown bread, not that different than a steamed English Christmas pudding. Try a can. Warm up the contents a bit. Slather it with butter like @silenus recommends. It sounds weird, but you may be pleasantly surprised.
I’ve never had them (I have had canned cake, though. mmmmm, dense cake) but I imagine your expectation is correct. Most plastic bagged tortillas aren’t really vacuum sealed, but they are sealed. I’d imagine the canned tortillas are heated as the can is sealed (I can’t imagine there being a liquid involved), so there’d be a nice negative pressure on them.
So yeah, the only thing weird about them is the packaging, really. We’re apparently just not used to canned bread.
I’m just picturing someone wants to make a ham sandwich and asks if anyone has some bread, and someone else pulls out this can and a can opener and says, “Have at it!”
Lol! I see what you mean!
Give it a try just for the hell of it. Don’t eat it with ham. 
Knock yourself out, Only $2.33 a slice,
I’m envisioning Trump sealed up in the presidential bunker after World War III as he’s being informed that his hamberders for the next 3-5 years are going to consist of cold Spam on freeze-dried 12-grain bread and there’s no ketchup.
I am curious about this part - were the canned tortillas packed in some sort of liquid? Or were they packed tight in a stack? Or just loose in there?
Yeah. Not sure why I said it that way. There’s clearly air in the plastic bags, and the paper bags, as well.
I found a video of Ashley’s canned tortillas, and that brand seems to have stacked them and rolled them in between sheets of wax paper. The Old El Paso cans I saw seem more like they would just be normally stacked and not rolled:
These days the can has a ring pull. Canned rye bread is standard in German field rations. There is a video floating around out there of a ration reviewer (Kiwidude?) encountering it for the first time and trying to eat it with a spoon rather than dumping the slices out of the can and separating them.
“Homemade” crispy taco shells as served in restaurants are pretty brittle and clearly show their provenance in a regular old corn tortillas. The pre made ones (Taco Bell, OEP, etc…) are usually considerably thicker and stiffer than their homemade counterparts.
I’m guessing they’re made with a much thicker tortilla to begin with, and are then likely fried via some sort of unusual method- they don’t have all the bubbles, uneven coloration, etc… that actual fried tortillas have. And almost certainly using some sort of contraption to hold the fresh tortilla in that specific shape. In other words, something that’s really hard to reproduce at home, strange ingredients notwithstanding.
I also suspect that the oven heating step isn’t an optional one in the minds of Old El Paso.
Finally, I suspect that Taco Bell and other fast-food places have MUCH faster turnover and more tightly orchestrated supply chains than your local supermarket. I’d be surprised if any given package of taco shells at a Taco Bell has more than a week or two from manufacturing to being served. Meanwhile, that box of taco shells at the grocery store may have been on that particular shelf for 3-4 weeks, never mind how long it was in the warehouse, etc…
In other news, have you tried these?
https://www.walmart.com/ip/Taco-Bell-Crunchy-Taco-Shells-12-ct-Box/33378082
Ahh! Thank you for that.
Wow, and from their description, they don’t seem too much the worse for wear. I’m not too surprised by that, I’ve seen steve1989mreinfo eat canned crackers from WWII that seemed crispy and ready to go.
I’ve read that Taco Bell has tried to crack the Mexican market twice, given up both times. They tried to sell their products as “American Food”. Even if it’s not true, it should be.
Folks love to diss Taco Bell; as long as you don’t think of it as Mexican food, it’s fine. It’s just something different.
Agree. My daughter recently moved to Oxnard, CA. Evidently, the area is a haven for tacos and there are a number of taquerias and more formal Mexican restaurants in town. We drove past one Taco Bell that appeared to be very busy. I guess it’s like the whole fast-food burger vs the “fast-casual” burger joints - sometimes quickness and convenience wins-out.
Agreed. I’m never excited about Taco Bell but it’s rare that I’m unhappy about the food I get there.
I also remember when I was extremely poor (as in, working part time minimum wage trying to put myself through college) and they were selling 39 cent crunchy tacos. That sustained me at times.
Kind of like Panda Express and Chinese food. There is a YouTube video where a guy has his girlfriend from China try PE for the first time. Reactions ranged from, “How… interesting,” to “We don’t have anything like this in China but it’s pretty tasty,” to “Yeah, I can see something like this back home.”