We Don't Talk Enough About Tacos
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Puffy Tacos at Tio Dan's in Round Rock, TX[/caption]
Tex-Mex food has become so ubiquitous on the American culinary landscape that I think it tends to be overlooked. It is the best food in the world. Everyone's favorite ingredients can be found in Mexican food, no matter what you like. Tacos, burritos, taquitos, flautas, fajitas, carne guisada, lengua, barbacoa, cabrito, the list of amazing dishes could literally fill up an entire blog or the lyrics to a song. Mixing the culinary legacies of the deep South, immigrants from the Old World (mainly German), and that of the states of Northern Mexico, Tex-Mex has something to please every palette and gullet alike.
Out of all of them though, the taco is probably the best. The taco is probably the pinnacle of mankind. Take a flour or corn tortilla, fill it with some meat, put some veggies and salsa and instantly you're in heaven. I have, fairly often, eaten tacos for all three meals of the day. A chorizo and potato taco for breakfast, barbacoa tacos for lunch, and lengua or chicharrones tacos for supper. (Who knows, maybe a Choco Taco for dessert?) It's all indulgent and wonderful.
Because of this, I don't think that we talk about tacos enough. As you can see in the picture above, I had a wonderful lunch of Puffy Tacos earlier this week. Puffy Tacos have shells that, unlike crunchy or soft tacos, consist of flash fried masa harina. When fried just right they puff up and provide an alluringly soft, yet crunchy texture and a sweet, almost cake like flavor. It's amazing. After a cursory search on the Google, I'm not sure that you can even get puffy tacos in Kentucky, and for that you have my sincerest sympathies. What makes these tacos so good though is how the ingredients inside meld together. This is true of all tacos. The mixture of meat (ground beef), veggies (iceberg lettuce and tomatoes), Salsa (a nice spicy red), and cheese meld together with this slightly sweet, soft taco shell is an adventure in your mouth.
The freedom you have with tacos is admirable. Ground beef is interchangeable with shredded chicken, or pork tinga, or guisada. You can use cabbage instead of lettuce, put carrots or any other veggie in there. Want salsa verde? Go for it. The options are almost limitless. If you experiment with enough ingredients you can find the perfect taco, with each ingredient working in perfect harmony, for every meal. There is no other food on the planet that is this versatile, this elegantly simple, or this delicious. Tacos are so consistently good, and so easy to get, that they don't get all of the love they deserve even though they're the best.
Now, you're saying to yourself "Kalan, this is a stretch, even for you. You've written about a bunch of silly things, A BUNCH, but this is a sports website and this is an article about tacos, c'mon man." But let me tell you a little bit about the puffy taco and you'll see where I'm going with this.
The puffy taco doesn't have a very solid origin story, but it definitely originated in San Antonio, probably at a restaurant called Ray's Drive Inn. Ray's is very famous locally for their puffy tacos and they advertise that they serve 500 a day. The puffy taco from Ray's is even one of the mascots for the AA San Antonio Missions. It's a thing. Things in San Antonio are often overshadowed by things in other cities, the same way that tacos are overshadowed by other foods. San Antonio is a blue collar city, famous for its Riverwalk, the Mercado, its oil and gas companies, and probably not much else. If you were to ask most people about interesting cities in Texas, it's probably not a stretch to say that you'll hear more about Austin, Dallas, and Houston than you will about San Antonio.
This is where I was going to slyly transition to talk about the San Antonio Spurs, but that game sapped the slyness out of me. Even despite tonight's let down, the Spurs are the best, most exciting basketball team to watch in the NBA. They are an underrated offense, they take disparate parts and put them together to make something greater than their sum, and they have a great mixture of international flavor. I'm not sure, having just watched Game 2, that I can be nearly as eloquent and neat as I had originally intended. I'm still too angry at missed shots, missed calls, whiny Heat players, and every little cheap basketball trick that Dwayne Wade pulls. (Deep breath) But maybe neatness isn't called for here, because tacos tend to get pretty messy.
The Miami Heat are an expensive steak. You have a 21 oz. New York Strip (LeBron), garlic mashed potatoes (Bosh), and grilled asparagus that falls off of the table anytime your fork grazes it (Wade). Expensive, delicious, overpriced, and the beau ideal of a fancy meal. Then you have the Spurs, the taco of the world. They take tons of different ingredients from all over the world (Parker, Diaw - France, Ginobili - Argentina, Splitter - Brazil, Duncan - Virgin Islands), throw them into a big flour tortilla (The HEB Fanzone at the AT&T Center) and they put on the most flavorful display that anyone could ask for.
The Spurs and tacos are consistently underrated, but I'm here to tell you, both are pretty much the best. You can let everyone tell you how boring they are, how steak is better, and you can root for LeBron to carry the rest of that terrible team to another title (Ugh.) or, you could think about the unheralded little guy. The little team in a small market city that plays the best basketball on the planet, the little food stuffed tortillas that carry the best flavor on the planet. Doesn't seem like much of a choice does it? Go Spurs, Go.
PS. See what I did there, with the long play of the Spurs/Taco metaphor. Didn't think I was going there, did you? Yeah, high five Kalan! No, gonna leave me hangin'? Ok, all right that's cool... Um talk to you later then. See ya. Err...
Puffy Tacos at Tio Dan's in Round Rock, TX[/caption]
Tex-Mex food has become so ubiquitous on the American culinary landscape that I think it tends to be overlooked. It is the best food in the world. Everyone's favorite ingredients can be found in Mexican food, no matter what you like. Tacos, burritos, taquitos, flautas, fajitas, carne guisada, lengua, barbacoa, cabrito, the list of amazing dishes could literally fill up an entire blog or the lyrics to a song. Mixing the culinary legacies of the deep South, immigrants from the Old World (mainly German), and that of the states of Northern Mexico, Tex-Mex has something to please every palette and gullet alike.
Out of all of them though, the taco is probably the best. The taco is probably the pinnacle of mankind. Take a flour or corn tortilla, fill it with some meat, put some veggies and salsa and instantly you're in heaven. I have, fairly often, eaten tacos for all three meals of the day. A chorizo and potato taco for breakfast, barbacoa tacos for lunch, and lengua or chicharrones tacos for supper. (Who knows, maybe a Choco Taco for dessert?) It's all indulgent and wonderful.
Because of this, I don't think that we talk about tacos enough. As you can see in the picture above, I had a wonderful lunch of Puffy Tacos earlier this week. Puffy Tacos have shells that, unlike crunchy or soft tacos, consist of flash fried masa harina. When fried just right they puff up and provide an alluringly soft, yet crunchy texture and a sweet, almost cake like flavor. It's amazing. After a cursory search on the Google, I'm not sure that you can even get puffy tacos in Kentucky, and for that you have my sincerest sympathies. What makes these tacos so good though is how the ingredients inside meld together. This is true of all tacos. The mixture of meat (ground beef), veggies (iceberg lettuce and tomatoes), Salsa (a nice spicy red), and cheese meld together with this slightly sweet, soft taco shell is an adventure in your mouth.
The freedom you have with tacos is admirable. Ground beef is interchangeable with shredded chicken, or pork tinga, or guisada. You can use cabbage instead of lettuce, put carrots or any other veggie in there. Want salsa verde? Go for it. The options are almost limitless. If you experiment with enough ingredients you can find the perfect taco, with each ingredient working in perfect harmony, for every meal. There is no other food on the planet that is this versatile, this elegantly simple, or this delicious. Tacos are so consistently good, and so easy to get, that they don't get all of the love they deserve even though they're the best.
Now, you're saying to yourself "Kalan, this is a stretch, even for you. You've written about a bunch of silly things, A BUNCH, but this is a sports website and this is an article about tacos, c'mon man." But let me tell you a little bit about the puffy taco and you'll see where I'm going with this.
The puffy taco doesn't have a very solid origin story, but it definitely originated in San Antonio, probably at a restaurant called Ray's Drive Inn. Ray's is very famous locally for their puffy tacos and they advertise that they serve 500 a day. The puffy taco from Ray's is even one of the mascots for the AA San Antonio Missions. It's a thing. Things in San Antonio are often overshadowed by things in other cities, the same way that tacos are overshadowed by other foods. San Antonio is a blue collar city, famous for its Riverwalk, the Mercado, its oil and gas companies, and probably not much else. If you were to ask most people about interesting cities in Texas, it's probably not a stretch to say that you'll hear more about Austin, Dallas, and Houston than you will about San Antonio.
This is where I was going to slyly transition to talk about the San Antonio Spurs, but that game sapped the slyness out of me. Even despite tonight's let down, the Spurs are the best, most exciting basketball team to watch in the NBA. They are an underrated offense, they take disparate parts and put them together to make something greater than their sum, and they have a great mixture of international flavor. I'm not sure, having just watched Game 2, that I can be nearly as eloquent and neat as I had originally intended. I'm still too angry at missed shots, missed calls, whiny Heat players, and every little cheap basketball trick that Dwayne Wade pulls. (Deep breath) But maybe neatness isn't called for here, because tacos tend to get pretty messy.
The Miami Heat are an expensive steak. You have a 21 oz. New York Strip (LeBron), garlic mashed potatoes (Bosh), and grilled asparagus that falls off of the table anytime your fork grazes it (Wade). Expensive, delicious, overpriced, and the beau ideal of a fancy meal. Then you have the Spurs, the taco of the world. They take tons of different ingredients from all over the world (Parker, Diaw - France, Ginobili - Argentina, Splitter - Brazil, Duncan - Virgin Islands), throw them into a big flour tortilla (The HEB Fanzone at the AT&T Center) and they put on the most flavorful display that anyone could ask for.
The Spurs and tacos are consistently underrated, but I'm here to tell you, both are pretty much the best. You can let everyone tell you how boring they are, how steak is better, and you can root for LeBron to carry the rest of that terrible team to another title (Ugh.) or, you could think about the unheralded little guy. The little team in a small market city that plays the best basketball on the planet, the little food stuffed tortillas that carry the best flavor on the planet. Doesn't seem like much of a choice does it? Go Spurs, Go.
PS. See what I did there, with the long play of the Spurs/Taco metaphor. Didn't think I was going there, did you? Yeah, high five Kalan! No, gonna leave me hangin'? Ok, all right that's cool... Um talk to you later then. See ya. Err...
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