The Taco: Not Really a Sandwich. Or Is It?

Taco does not currently appear on the Wikipedia List of Sandwiches. It was listed there in the past for a brief period. Back around late 2014 or early 2015, when I realized that this project would be going on for a long time, and that it might be nice to plan ahead rather than simply grab the next three off the Wikipedia page at the beginning of every month, I copied and pasted the list to our Schedule page and planned out the next five years of my sandwich-eating life. Taco was on the list then. So were S’Mores. So was the Scooch, which we’ll be covering next month, and the KFC Double Down, which no longer even exists.

Subsequently, the wiki editors who concern themselves with the list of sandwiches decided to remove these items from that List. S’Mores were the first to go, and the Double Down went not long after. The Scooch hung on for a while longer, but Taco was removed in June of 2015 without much fanfare or disagreement. Tacos were never a controversial removal the way hot dogs have been from time to time.

Yet we kept tacos on our List here, not least because I could envision a time, years in the future, when I’d spend a month having a constant excuse to eat tacos. That day has come. It’s Taco Time at the Tribunal. Are they a sandwich? That kind of depends on how you think about sandwiches.

Tacos are a type of antojitos, or Mexican street food, snacks to eat on the go. According to Wikipedia, “the taco has its origins in the pre Hispanic period, when other foods were eaten with tortillas, used as a scoop. The modern taco developed in Mexico’s rural areas when wives would bring their husband’s meals to the fields wrapped in tortillas.” Jeffrey M. Pilcher, a professor of History at the University of Minnesota, has studied tacos for decades. He wrote the book Planet Taco: A Global History of Mexican Food in which he traced the origin of the word taco to 18th Century silver mines in Mexico. At that time, small charges of gunpowder wrapped in paper were ignited in rock face crevices to open new pathways in the mine. These paper wrappings were called tacos.

Pilcher adds that some of the earliest records of tacos as a food item were references to tacos de mineros, or Miners’ Tacos. These tacos were made ahead of time, flavorful fillings wrapped in fried corn tortillas, kept warm in a basket by their own steam until the time came to eat them. Today, they’re often called tacos sudados (sweaty tacos) or tacos de canasta (basket tacos).

As it happens, tacos de canasta have been a bit of a hot topic locally lately, with friend of the site Titus Ruscitti questing for them, and finding them, at various street carts and pop-up stands on the south and southwest side of Chicago. Inspired by his posts, Mindy and I went looking for a particular cart on a Saturday morning earlier this month. We didn’t find the cart, but while asking around a few taquerias in Little Village after tacos de canasta, we were directed to a brick-and-mortar restaurant on 47th Street called Guapo Taco.

Guapo Taco serves 9 different varieties of tacos de canasta, which feature a small corn tortilla lightly coated in an oily sauce txo help keep it soft and pliable, folded around its respective filling. Some feature bolder flavors, like a chicken in mole sauce, while others are milder, such as potatoes or potatoes and chorizo. My personal favorite was the chicharron, fried pork skin softened with salsa verde. They were served all in a single container, with fried onions atop, and small baggies containing salsa verde and a pickled chili and vegetable mix on the side.

Speaking of Titus, his blog, and his search for real street tacos, I thought of a recent tweet of his while in Costco earlier this month. Costco was selling a “street taco” kit containing flour tortillas, seasoned chicken breast, “lime cilantro crema,” salsa, shredded cheese, and what appeared to be undressed coleslaw mix.

https://twitter.com/chibbqking/status/1152357717765427203

We bought these “street tacos” and made them at home, minus the salsa, which looked and smelled like marinara sauce. Instead, I picked some tomatoes and serranos from our garden and made pico de gallo. They turned out… pretty?

These were total gringo tacos though, much like the kind we made at mom’s house growing up. They were fine. They were satisfying, even, though the “lime cilantro crema” tasted quite a bit like mayonnaise. The most “street” thing about them though was the tank of gas we bought on our way out of the store.

The stand that we’d wanted to visit though (which we still haven’t found–help a brother out, Titus!) is related to what is commonly thought of as the best place for tacos in Chicago, La Chaparrita on 25th Street.

This shop is nominally a grocery–and tucked back behind the tables, counters, and shrines, there are still a few shelves of dry goods–but the taqueria appears to have largely taken over the space. The service is friendly, and shortly after arriving we are brought three table salsas, dishes of limes and sliced radishes for garnish, and even a sample of the tacos de canasta they sell for carryout by the dozen.

La Chaparrita’s menu, aside from standards like tacos al pastor (shepherd-style tacos, marinaded pork cooked on a vertical spit with onions and pineapple, a Mexican innovation to the shawarma brought over by Lebanese immigrants) and carne asada (grilled steak), and slightly-less common meats like cecina (dried beef) and longaniza (pork sausage), reads like a Spanish-language anatomy textbook. Sesos (brains), lengua (tongue), tripas (tripe), mollejas (sweetbreads), cabeza (head). Next to us, through the kitchen window, I could see a large pot of various body parts simmering, awaiting their chance to become tacos.

Mindy, sensibly, ordered her two favorites: carne asada and al pastor. The steak came in a single large piece, rather than chopped into bits as is often the case, and was fine. The al pastor, despite the lack of a vertical spit, was juicy and flavorful, with some nice charred bits.

I, on the other hand, foolishly ordered “one of each.” After some back-and-forth wherein I tried to explain, perhaps unsuccessfully, what “one of each” meant, I was delivered this tray:

I was overwhelmed by sensation. I did not take good notes, nor was I entirely certain from bite to bite which taco I was eating. I could try to reconstruct for you what each of these tasted like but instead I will encourage you to visit La Chaparrita and try them for yourself. If you do, be sure to order your tripe taco crispy.

There’s a deep organ meat flavor here, intensified by the hard griddling, that along with the crisp and soft textural contrast, the bite of the diced onion and the brightness of the cilantro, the tartness of the salsa verde and squirt of lime that one must of course add, make this one of the more interesting tacos you’ll ever meet.

I went on a taco rampage this month, visiting and revisiting our favorite local spots and places a bit farther afield. One of our nearby spots, El Gallo Tapatio on Cicero in Crestwood, IL, does some things very well, including their taco with chile relleno, a green chili pepper stuffed with cheese, battered and fried, or the bistec a la Mexicana, beef braised with tomatoes, onions, and chilies to represent the red, white, and green of the Mexican flag.

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Even closer to home, Los Burritos Lokos on 147th Street in Midlothian has always been my go-to for chicharron tacos, where the crispy fried pork skins are soaked in salsa verde to make an unusual but flavorful gelatinous filling. It turns out their carnitas are also quite good, though this filling of flavorful, crisp but tender fried shredded pork butt might be difficult to get wrong.

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But why, you may be asking, why in the world would I think of tacos as a kind of sandwich? It has to do with their niche in the Mexican culinary world, and the niche of the flatbread upon which they’re built, the tortilla.

I’ve talked before about how different cultures define the word sandwich–to, say, an Australian, the Popeyes chicken sandwich that’s been in the news lately wouldn’t be considered a sandwich, but a burger, due to the bun in which it’s served. A submarine sandwich would not be considered a sandwich either, but a roll. So we are already dealing with conflicting definitions of sandwich, that in which a sandwich consists of a filling or fillings between 2-3 pieces of sliced bread, and a broader definition in which a filling or fillings are conveyed to one’s mouth by use of some kind of edible bread vessel protecting one’s fingers from the (hot/cold/wet/slimy/gooey/stinky) filling inside.

Consider this: if you eat dinner at a fried chicken joint, you might get a biscuit or a slice of white bread with the meal. The same with barbecue. If you are eating ham for Christmas dinner, a biscuit. With your turkey on Thanksgiving, a dinner roll. Chili at a diner might come with cornbread. An Indian dinner might include naan or paratha or roti. An Ethiopian meal would not be an Ethiopian meal without injera bread. Breads are served with meals, whether to sop, to scoop, or to wrap. Sometimes, as with that ham and biscuit at Christmas, you’ll even stuff some of your meal inside the bread and eat it as a sandwich.

Similarly, when eating out at a Mexican restaurant, even if one isn’t ordering tacos, even if one orders, say, a steak dinner, one will be asked this question: corn or flour? The meal will be accompanied by tortillas, which you’ll use to sop (though tortillas are spectacularly bad at sopping), to scoop, or to wrap the contents of your plate. Sometimes, as with this guisado de puerco (a ragout or stew of pork) at the aforementioned El Gallo Tapatio, you’ll even spoon some of the entree in to make tacos.

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We recently revisited the restaurant QSazon (which featured in our piece on Pambazo in 2017)on Pulaski in Chicago, where I tried a dish called Bistec en Chile Pasilla y Papas, consisting of thin-sliced steak served with potatoes in a spectacular sauce made from dried pasilla chilies and roasted tomatillos.

This dish was fork-worthy, no accompaniment needed. Yet I felt compelled to wrap it up in the good corn tortillas they provided and squirt a little salsa verde on top.

Everywhere I drive recently, I see Mexican grilled chicken joints popping up. There is in fact one a mere 2-3 blocks up the street from my house, Pollo Asado Don Juan. These places subscribe to the admirable philosophy of “Do one thing, and do it well.” They also, in my experience, tend to be on the inexpensive side. For a hair under $20, we can get an entire grilled chicken, cut into pieces, with large sides of beans and Spanish rice, grilled onions, grilled jalapenos, table salsas, and a package of tortillas to wrap it all up.

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A grilled chicken thigh provides enough meat and skin to make 2 quite tasty tacos.

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None of these local places–Pollo Asado Don Juan, El Gallo Tapatio, Los Burritos Lokos–are destination-worthy. They’re good, in some cases really good, and I’m happy to have them around. I don’t expect a flood of people to pour into Midlothian and/or Crestwood to try them though. There are likely places in your neighborhood just as good, if not better.

We did get to one more destination-worthy place while exploring tacos this month, a place that gets mentioned every time the best tacos in Chicago are brought up–and they don’t even serve tacos. That is, they do, they certainly serve tacos, but that is not what we go there to order.

Birrieria Zaragoza also subscribes to the “do one thing, and do it well” mantra. Their “one thing” is birria tatemada, or roasted goat, which is salted and steamed, bone-in, before being rubbed with mole and roasted until impossibly tender. You can order it in a taco, sure. But most people order it by the plate or by the bowl.

Of course the “one thing” they do isn’t all they do. The goat may be perfectly seasoned and roasted, tender and falling off the bone, but it wouldn’t be quite as magical without the unbelievably good tomato consommé with which it is served. I ordered the plate, but I also ordered an extra bowl of consommé to go with it, just to drink. Just to drink, so richly savory and slightly spicy. Their house-made salsa molcajete, hand-ground from roasted tomatoes and ancho chilies in with a mortar and pestle, is equally indispensable.

The crowning piece of this experience though, may be the piece underlying it all, their fresh, hand-made tortillas, delivered to the table until you’re done eating them. These are by far the best tortillas I’ve ever had, just slightly thicker than a standard tortilla, fresh, still hot and ever-so-slightly crisp from the griddle. It is the perfect base upon which to build a taco.

And still, is that taco a sandwich? You may have come along the garden path with me, willing to agree that a tortilla fits the same culinary niche as a slice of bread or a dinner roll, and that a taco uses that tortilla in much the same way a sandwich uses its bread. You may not be willing to take that extra step with me, and say that the taco and the sandwich are one and the same thing. I think that there are two things people mean when they say “sandwich,” one of them being a very specific form served between sliced bread, and the other being “bread plus something tasty.” The taco is the latter. Hate me if you must. I’ll be over here eating tacos.