Recipe Notes: Tacos Dorados

25 June 2018

Recipe from Cook's Illustrated, July 2018

Tacos dorados is a regular dinner item at our house. It means crispy tacos, i.e. tacos served using a crispy corn taco shell. It is usually a pretty simple affair. The taco shells are store bought. These are brought to the table with an array of taco fillings: ground beef (sometimes seasoned, sometimes not), shredded lettuce and cheese, avocado, tomatoes, roasted corn, sliced olives, sour cream, taco sauce, salsa, etc. Each person then builds a taco to suit their taste. In this Cook's Illustrated recipe the meat is seasoned and the taco shells are fried at home. I wanted to try some of what was in the recipe but not make it too complicated, after all we are cooking for just the two of us. Thus, I prepared tacos in our normal fashion but I prepared the ground beef filling using the recipe from the magazine.

Ground beef (90% lean, 13 oz) was mixed with water and baking soda; this raised its pH and prevented it from getting tough and rubbery when cooked. In a skillet with hot oil, one finely chopped onion was cooked to soften the onion. The seasonings were added to bloom their flavors: chili powder, paprika, cumin, and garlic powder. After a minute or so the ground beef was added and cooked until no pink remained. Soy sauce was added (in place of the tomato paste in the recipe) and the mixture transferred to a bowl where shredded cheese was stirred in. Including these steps it took about 50 minutes to prepare dinner. The meat mixture was sufficient for three meals.

The resulting tacos were okay. By itself the meat mixture was too spicy for our tastes, but served with the other fixin's it was acceptable. But is it worth the extra effort to prepare this spicy meat mixture? Especially when the taco is seasoned with prepared salsa or bottled taco sauce? My answer is no and we will stick with our simpler, quicker method of preparing tacos. Nonetheless it was worth doing once and who knows, perhaps some of what we learned will be adopted to become part of our standard preparation.