Let’s taco ’bout breakfast

Do you wake up craving tacos? Last week, I did, and I decided to create a great non-traditional breakfast taco that you could serve for breakfast, lunch, or even dinner if that’s how you roll. What is this sandwich taco? I normally write about sandwiches—at least most of the time. This is not a sandwich. These are breakfast tacos. Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, this is my attempt to create a very tasty and pretty easy to replicate batch of savory tacos that you can quickly whip up for breakfast. I’m not going to tell you that I’m making authentic breakfast tacos here. To be totally fair, I’m not 100% sure what authentic breakfast tacos actually are. I dug into a very brief bit about the history of breakfast tacos a bit further down the page, but the tacos I made and shared recipes for are flour tortilla-based tacos that contain eggs, cheese, and meat. Technically, I made chorizo-focused breakfast tacos, but I also made a batch with chopped up bacon, and while those are the meats that I use in my recipe, you can use almost any meat or even vegetables you’d like. I view breakfast tacos in much the same way you’d view an omelette in that they are eggs AND. So for this particular blog post, it’s eggs and chorizo, and it’s eggs and bacon. Below, I’ve shared a video from chef Claire Saffitz where she visits a restaurant in Austin, Texas that makes a mean breakfast taco. One of the tacos they make is eggs and ham, and it seems like a good choice that would be easy to cook and slide into tortillas. If you’ve never watched her content, Claire Saffitz is a great baker/chef, and she’s also a fantastic teacher. If you want to learn more about breakfast tacos, check out this video when you have 20 minutes. I created this graphic so you can visualize what type of breakfast tacos we’re making here today. History of breakfast tacos? Just like the majority of food items that I cover on this sandwich blog, the history of the breakfast taco is murky. Some people think the modern-day American version of the breakfast taco might have originated in Austin or possibly San Antonio. But tacos with eggs as an ingredient are definitely sold and enjoyed in Mexico as well. Austin may claim that they invented the phrase “breakfast taco,” but if I had to guess, I would assume that some version of a breakfast taco has most likely existed since the day after the invention of the tortilla. A sandwich for our longest living PresidentI wrote about some very simple breakfast tacos in my tribute to Jimmy Carter. This combination was invented in 1976 in Texas, and it’s eggs, crushed peanuts, and salsa, since Carter owned peanut farms. If you like eggs and salsa, it works. CNN has a good article about the origin of the breakfast taco, including quite a bit about which parts of Mexico might be serving them. In that article, they mention a CNN special series with actress Eva Longoria, and in one segment, she visits a taco stand in Monterrey that serves machacado con huevo (dried and salted beef with eggs in flour tortillas). Now that we know what tacos we’re going to be making, we will need some flour tortillas. Flour tortillas Tex-Mex-style breakfast tacos seem to typically be served on flour tortillas and not corn tortillas. I mentioned this above, but I have made tacos and shared recipes and a blog post about some delicious crispy potato tacos before, and those were made on corn tortillas. But these were made from homemade flour tortillas that I have a simple recipe for below. The hardest part about making tortillas is the shaping process. In theory, your tortillas should be round, or at least round-ish. Getting them to look like the kind you buy at the store takes a bit of practice, but it’s not hard. And even if they’re not perfectly round, they will still taste good. My tortilla recipe makes 9 or 10 six-inch tortillas. Roll or press the tortillas out until you can almost see through them. If you have a griddle, you can cook more than one tortilla at a time. You want the dough to be tacky and not sticky. I personally do not use a lot of flour on the surface when I’m rolling out tortillas. I use the slight tackiness of the dough to help it stretch just a bit further. When you are shaping round dough like tortillas or pizza, you will learn that you can stretch the dough out, and then it will naturally want to relax and shrink. But I’ve found that I can stretch the dough until it is around the size that I want, and since the dough is just a bit tacky, it will stick to the surface and keep its shape as it relaxes. You also need to remember that you should roll out or flatten the dough until you can almost see through it, so that the tortillas cook evenly and are thin enough. We’re trying to make tortillas and not pitas. Roll or flatten the dough more than you might originally think it needs to be. We’re shooting for tortillas that are six inches across, but since the dough will shrink a little bit during the transfer from counter to pan, you will probably want to shape out the dough into 7 or 8-inch rounds on the counter. Do your best to make round tortillas, but don’t sweat it too hard. Covering your freshly cooked tortillas with a clean kitchen towel to finish the cooking process with steam. The steaming process helps keep the tortillas soft, flexible, and pliable. After the tortillas are browned, it’s super important to immediately cover them with a clean kitchen towel until they’ve fully cooled—or you’ve eaten them all—whichever comes first. The towel and the heat of the tortillas are part of the cooking process. Just like other baked goods, tortillas aren’t fully cooked immediately as they are removed from the heat source. Because of the heat stored inside them, they continue to cook while they are cooling, and a towel forces them to steam themselves until they are even softer and more pliable. Don’t skip this step. Good flour tortillas really elevate a breakfast taco. Here’s what seven mostly circular flour tortillas look like. Here’s my recipe for the flour tortillas I used in the breakfast tacos you’ll see on this blog post. You can obviously skip this step and buy your favorite flour or corn tortillas if you’d like. Six-inch flour tortillas Recipe 1 hour and 35 minutes Six-inch flour tortillas If you need some soft flour tortillas for tacos, this recipe works perfectly. Get Recipe Try: Six-inch flour tortillas in our Bun Calculator Meat I mostly used pork chorizo on the tacos you’ll be seeing here today. But I did make one with bacon instead. Basically, you can use pretty much any meat you want as long as it’s in a smaller than bite sized pieces. Bacon works great, pork sausage works great, and even thinly sliced steak would be fantastic. This is a fairly common brand of chorizo in my area. Chorizo will appear wet and almost like sloppy joe meat when you’re cooking it. As the chorizo cools after being fully cooked, it will firm up a bit more like cooked and crumbled pork sausage. I personally cooked the chorizo a couple of hours in advance to make the taco cooking and assembly quicker. After the meat was cooked and cooled, I added it to the fridge, and when it was time to make tacos, I would simply warm the meat up in the pan alongside the eggs. Eggs For the egg part of a breakfast taco, you’ll want some scrambled eggs. In my mind, the presence of the eggs is what makes these breakfast tacos instead of regular tacos. Once the egg is added, the name changes. For me, 1 egg per taco works pretty well. It might be a little too much egg for some people, but 1 egg per taco seems to fill up the tortilla for me. I scramble the eggs in a bowl and salt them while they are sitting there. Then, when the eggs are cooking, I will add black pepper. I do not salt the eggs while they are in the pan unless I forget, and I watched this Kenji video a couple of years ago that has encouraged me to keep doing things this way. Then I add butter to the pan and swirl it around so that the melted butter coats as much of the pan surface as possible. While the egg is cooking, but mostly set, I throw in the meat of choice and use the residual heat to warm everything up. You could go ahead and mix the meat in with the egg at this point if you want, but I do keep them separate because I think it looks a little better in the photos to have two separate components. Even if you’re using a non-stick pan, you should use a good amount of butter to make sure your eggs do not stick. I like to cook my eggs in a soft scramble because they will continue cooking and firming up as you prep your tortillas, and while inside the taco alongside the hot meat and cheese. When the eggs have a couple of minutes of cooking time left, add your meat. In this case, I was making chorizo tacos. Once everything is cooked and warmed through, it’s time to add cheese and taco. Cheese There are all sorts of cheese options you could use in a breakfast taco, but I chose to use Monterey Jack for these tacos. I wanted something a bit melty that would add creaminess and not much else. I think Pepper Jack would be a good cheese to use if you wanted creaminess, with the addition of a little kick of heat. For other cheese options, you could go with whatever you have in your fridge if you wanted. Cheese selections like cheddar would be fine, but if you wanted to go with more of a Tex-Mex focus, you’d probably want to use Queso Fresco or something like Oaxaca cheese. You could also skip cheese altogether if you wanted. In my opinion, the eggs add a lot of creaminess that you might find works just fine without the cheese. For the best tacos, shred your own cheese. I named this bag “Jack.” Roasted tomatillo salsa This salsa brings a bit of zing to the breakfast tacos that I created. It’s also really good served with tortilla chips. The tomatillos, jalapenos, and garlic are all roasted under an oven broiler until they get a little bit of char on them, and then they are pulsed in the food processor or blender with the rest of the ingredients until a semi-thick salsa is formed. The return on investment here is high because you can get this salsa on the table in less than 30 minutes, and everyone eating it will think you spent much more time and effort putting it all together. Dehusk the tomatillos, halve the jalapenos, and blast everything under the oven broiler. Everything will get a bit of roasting and char, which brings flavor to the finished salsa. This salsa brings a nice bit of tartness that balances out the fatty meat and creamy cheese. In my opinion, this salsa is medium-low in heat, but jalapenos, like all peppers, are variable, and some might end up hotter than others. If you’re apprehensive about spiciness or you’d prefer a milder salsa, you can remove all the seeds and white pith inside each jalapeno, but make sure you wash your hands thoroughly afterwards or use gloves when doing it. For your breakfast tacos, you can go without salsa, or you can buy your favorite store-bought brands. But in my opinion, the recipe shared here works perfectly with eggs, meat, and cheese. Roasted tomatillo salsa Recipe 26 minutes Roasted tomatillo salsa A bright, tangy, and fresh salsa that's perfect on a chip or as a sauce on your next chicken biscuit. Get Recipe Breakfast taco build process This part is simple. Our breakfast taco components are eggs, meat, and cheese—plus the optional salsa—so you can build these however you like. But I typically will go cheese first so that the cheese is between the warm tortilla and covered by hot eggs and meat. This helps the cheese to melt, but you can put it on top if you want. Add a healthy amount of cheese to the tortilla so it’ll be under the hot eggs and chorizo. The eggs and meat should warm up the cheese. Spoon on some salsa and get to work. Amount of components per taco My recipe below is for 3 tacos. That’s an odd number, and it might be more than a serving for most people. I’d probably jump between 2 or 3 tacos depending on the day, but my wife would likely only want 2. Because of this, I put some thought into the exact amount of each component that I think a single breakfast taco needs. If you want to adjust this recipe for more or fewer than three tacos, I personally think 1 large egg per taco is about right for a serving size for me. The meat you can basically guess at, but an ounce or two is more than enough for a single taco. I think the filled breakfast taco should contain more egg than meat. Somewhere between 1/2 and 1 ounce of shredded cheese is plenty for each taco that you are making. You want these to have a pretty good amount of cheese. Salsa and any garnishes you can probably guess at. Ain’t nobody around here measuring salsa. Wrapping the tacos This part is not required, and it is a little wasteful. But if you want the true breakfast taco experience as you’d get at a taco stand, you should wrap your tacos in foil or paper. I find it easier to wrap in foil, and that foil also helps to keep the tacos warm, which makes the tortillas extra pliable, and it ensures that the cheese inside the tacos becomes gooey and melty. Build the taco on top of parchment or foil. Fold the taco over and wrap things up. Let the taco sit while you make a drink, and then unwrap your present. Breakfast taco photos and recipe I took quite a few photos of tacos over the past week or so. You can check some of those out here, and I’ve also created a fairly simple recipe that I’ve shared below for how to create 3 chorizo breakfast tacos. I wrote the recipe in such a way that you can easily double it or adjust things in order to make more or fewer tacos than 3. Give it a try and let me know how things turn out. Eat more tacos for breakfast! Here’s another version of the taco that I painted this week. Turns out it’s hard to photograph and paint these. I may not have eaten breakfast tacos in Austin, but I’ve had pretty good ones in my kitchen. I’ve tried red salsa, but my roasted tomatillo salsa works so much better. Two chorizo tacos comin’ up! Most of these are made with chorizo, but here’s one of the bacon tacos that I made during testing. Eggs and flour tortillas are good all by themselves, but add chorizo and cheese to up the ante. You can use whatever breakfast meat you’d like in tacos like this. Ham, steak, even leftover turkey from Thanksgiving would be great. These are very comforting tacos. Here’s what a handful of porky and eggy goodness looks like. Chorizo breakfast tacos Recipe Chorizo breakfast tacos These tacos are easy to whip up and extremely satisfying. The fatty pork works really well with the creamy eggs and melty cheese. For the full experience, you can try my flour tortilla and roasted tomatillo salsa recipe, or you can use your favorite store-bought brands. cheese chorizo eggs tacos by Jonathan Surratt Ingredients: 2 to 3 whole large eggs pinch of salt3 to 4 ounces chorizo2 to 3 teaspoons butter ground black pepper to taste3 six-inch flour tortillas (recipe here)2 to 3 ounces Monterey Jack, pepper Jack or cheddar, shredded your favorite salsa (my recipe here) Direct Link to Recipe Directions: Crack your eggs into a bowl and season with salt. Whisk to combine and set aside. Cook the chorizo in a medium pan over medium heat for around 8 to 10 minutes. Move the meat to a paper-towel-lined plate to drain and wipe out the pan. Place the pan back over medium-low heat and add butter. When the butter is melted and foamy, swirl the pan to let the butter coat the bottom surface, and then add the eggs. Season the eggs with ground black pepper. Cook the eggs, stirring with a spatula, until they are set, but not fully cooked. They should still look a bit moist. Move the eggs over to one side of the pan and then add the chorizo back into the pan to warm up again. When the eggs are almost fully cooked, place three tortillas stacked on a plate covered by a lightly damp paper towel into the microwave for 20 to 30 seconds. This will soften the tortillas and get them ready for taco time. To build the tacos, add a bit of shredded cheese on top of each tortilla. Then cover that with eggs and chorizo. Add any salsa or garnish, and for a true taco stand experience, wrap each tortilla in a small piece of aluminum foil or parchment for 2 to 3 minutes to warm and soften everything. Serve and enjoy. Notes: If you want to adjust this recipe for more or fewer than three tacos, I personally think 1 large egg per taco is about right for a serving size. The meat you can basically guess at, but an ounce or two is more than enough for a single taco. I think the filled breakfast taco should contain more egg than meat. I think somewhere between 1/2 and 1 ounce of shredded cheese is plenty for each taco that you are making. Check back next week This is a taco sandwich blog called Bounded by Buns, and it’s been FIVE whole months since I wrote about a sandwich in a regular ol’ bun. We’re going to fix that next Monday.