When I think about building a taco, oddly enough I find myself reverting to the simplicity of cooking Italian food. Cook from scratch, source the best ingredients for the dish, execute fundamental cooking techniques perfectly, don’t over think it. This is something that can be said for most great dishes. The components needed to create my “perfect” taco would be these four especially important things.
Starting from the top of the taco, there needs to be texture. Texture can come in many different shapes and forms. It can be creamy, crunchy, firm, or chewy. You get it. Next making sure that the texture is seasoned properly because it’s one of the first parts of the taco that you taste.
Under that you should find some type of salsa, which should produce electrifying flavor bombs complementing the main body of the taco. There are many different types of salsas. Cooked, raw, oil based, chunky, and blended. Salsas are kind of like moles, there are as many different salsas as there are cities in Mexico.
The main body of the taco, (but not the holy grail) is considered the filling. I am not talking about some type of ground meat mixed with an overkill amount of taco seasoning. The proper body of a taco is nothing new, it is centuries of generations cooking. Next to different types of vegetables and chili’s, the most understood tacos include large cuts of different meats, broken down and marinated with some type of adobo, cooked in a flavored broth or liquid fat, or buried in the ground and slow cooked for hours. These techniques never need to be changed, only embraced by the right thought process.
Last and certainly not least the tortilla. I think the most important part of a perfect taco is the tortilla, it is ultimately the deciding factor that separates a forgettable taco from and epiphany, if you have never experienced and true freshly made tortilla. I stand firm on this matter, when it comes to homemade tortillas, there is absolutely no substitute for fresh, there just is not any comparison to come close to the daily grind, period!