Taco Tuesday: "North of the Border" Tacos

[Music] welcome to another edition of Taco Tuesday and what I'm going to show you today may be called an up-to-date version of the taco that you perhaps ate when you were a kid that ground beef taco so you could just get it in your mind you cook the ground beef you open the little packet of seasonings the taco seasonings you put that in there and then you put the crunchy fresh stuff with it we're kind of gonna do that but the first thing that you're gonna have to do if you're gonna make this and you're gonna make it well is to choose what kind of ground beef you're gonna use for it so what I've got right here is two choices okay this was just ground beef 80% lean and ninety percent lean the 80 will give you a richer end product you can see it's lighter in color that means it's got a little bit more fat in it the the 90 will give you a leaner drier product a little bit less flavorful but I don't know if you're drawn to that then you're probably drawn to that for other reasons but I'm gonna like point at some really great flavor principles here if you have any qualms at all about buying ground beef for health reasons then just grind your own it's actually really easy if you have a food processor this is Chuck this is a chuck boneless chuck roast you just get a slab of that that's about a pound this will be about 80% in the lean to fat ratio cut it into cubes like I have 1-inch cubes stick it into the freezer for 15 or so minutes just to firm it up and then I'm gonna put it all into this food processor here it will not be frozen solid by any means it will just be firm that will allow it to grind more evenly here put the top on your food processor and then just start the grinding process here okay now what I have here is what I would call sort of coarse ground beef of this beautiful piece of Chuck and I just kept pulsing until I got it exactly the way that I wanted it in the skillet here I have some onion cooking in a little bit of oil until it's browned and then I'm gonna put all of this meat in there tip that out like that and we'll stir everything around here I'm gonna use a pair of tongs so that I can break it up I'm working over a fairly high fire here and here's the trick about browning ground beef you have to do it in a big skillet so that you can separate it and you can get as much of the brown of the ground beef in contact with the hot surface as possible okay so we're gonna let this so you can see it's already starting Brown we're gonna let this continue to brown nicely if you crowded in a small pan it'll just sweat and it'll start to release liquid which is not what you want it all that's like stewed ground beef not brown to ground beef now the packet that you would normally buy for this is taco seasoning on him you can make your own all you have to do is find some pure uncho chili powder and that's the base of it for you so I've got a couple of tablespoons of the pure and uncho chili powder I've got some Mexican oregano ground black pepper and this is some chipotle powder powder just Chipotle Chili's nothing else and I'm gonna pick all of this up you can put that Chipotle in or not put it in depending on your taste for spicy food I'm gonna sprinkle all of this around on the top of it now what you might not know is that most of the taco seasonings have some sugar in it so I'm gonna put a little bit of sugar over the top of this that'll give you that familiar flavor I'm gonna give it some salt this will just be our preliminary seasoning here and then the last of the seasoning is gonna go in here is that classic cumin seasoning some people say that what you really need to do is toast the cumin but to tell you the truth in those makes it's not ptosis you could choose to do that take the whole cumin seeds and toast to those in a dry skillet or you can just do what I'm doing is taking about a half a teaspoon and this is all to suit your own taste as well if you like a lot of cumin then you can put more than a half a teaspoon in there but I'm gonna crush this and the reason I'm doing this from scratch where I had all those other things ground already well is because the flavor of fresh ground cumin is so much more lively than ground cumin that you would buy at the grocery store I'm using a pastry brush to get it out of the mortar I'm using the met classic Mexican mortar here put that over here and then let's just go ahead and mix all of these things in to our beautifully browning pork and onion okay so at this point you should be smelling that telltale sign of taco night when you were 8 or 9 years old perhaps and we'll let this cook just a little bit more and then I'll give it a little taste but let's go on to talk about the other ingredients that you need for something like this looks good my mouth is watering okay when it comes to the tortillas you know I just couldn't do the u-shaped tortillas that come in a box and you have no idea when they were fried they taste very much like the box that they come in so I thought that's not who I am in 2018 so we're gonna go for a soft fresh made corn tortilla or if you just buy a package of tortillas and heat them up if you're a flour tortilla person and that's what you grew up with and that's what you're gonna choose for this we've got some beautiful tomatoes here we've got some sour cream we've got some I use romaine lettuce maybe you use iceberg lettuce and we've got some cheese here to put on top of it so what I'm gonna do is to give it this sure it tastes it's in the skillet now and see where we are flavor-wise and if it's gonna need a little bit more salt okay so flavor-wise it's bolder then the flavors you would get out of that taco seasoning packet cuz I put two tablespoons of the ancho powder and I put that Chipotle powder but this is gonna be satisfying to me it's gonna give me all of those great flavors sort of revved up a little bit and because I browned the meat it's gonna be super delicious now well--that's of people would put the cheese on this just after they have built their taco but I'm gonna take some of the cheese and I'm gonna add it to the skillet because that's what I like is a lot of melted cheese here and just ER it long enough for it to melt and hold everything together skip this step if this doesn't appeal to you at all I'm going to turn the fire off here then we'll start building our little taco so I've got the warm corn tortillas I'll take a couple of those and lay them down spoon our ground beef filling down the middle of it and you can smell the sweetness of the onions in there the next thing I'm gonna put on here is a little bit of sour cream because I like the richness of that because I can I'm gonna put a little bit more cheese over the top of it and then of course we've got the fresh garnishes of tomato and a little bit of the thinly sliced romaine and because I like spice I'm gonna reach over and grab a little bit of Mexican hot sauce the Valentina hot sauce and just put that over the top of that yeah it might not be exactly what you grew up on but I think it might satisfy the cravings for a little nostalgia [Music]

Channel: Rick Bayless

Views: 108,644

Rating: 4.8988581 out of 5

Keywords: Rick Bayless, tacos, Taco Tuesday, recipes, chef, kitchen, Mexican, tortillas, nostalgia, spices, hot sauce

Id: 9Vuxz2Yqqpw

Length: 9min 18sec (558 seconds)

Published: Tue May 29 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/Stimmolation]

That is a good start.

[u/lifewontwait86]

I stock for a warehouse and noticed this morning he has like 5 different flavors.

[u/doesntmeanathing]

Look out HOT tip coming through