North America · Volume 35, Tex-Mex, the Rio Grande and the Desert Southwest

Breakfast tacos

Name: Breakfast tacos
Total time: 20 min
Yield: Serves 4
Cuisine: Tex-Mex, the Rio Grande and the Desert Southwest
Ingredients: 4 stale corn tortillas, torn into rough pieces; 2 tbsp lard or vegetable oil; ½ white onion, diced; 1 tomato, diced; 1 jalapeño, diced; 8 eggs, beaten; to taste salt; 100g grated cheese; 8 flour tortillas, warmed

Texas

Breakfast tacos with migas, scrambled egg and crisp tortilla in a warm flour tortilla: two soft flour tortillas loosely folded around a golden scramble of egg studded with crisp tortilla strips, diced tomato and jalapeño.

An illustration of the dish, not a photograph of it cooked.

Time: 20 minutes

Researched: 26 sources cited
Reviewed: Not yet reviewed from inside the tradition
Cooked: Not yet cooked and reported

Scrambled eggs with crisp tortilla strips, onion, tomato and jalapeño, wrapped in a warm flour tortilla, San Antonio's own claim to the dish and Austin's own name for this particular filling. CNN Travel

by Texas

The earliest located use of the phrase "breakfast tacos" sits in the 23 July 1975 food pages of The Arizona Republic, describing a tour of San Antonio, not Austin. That did not stop a 2016 Eater Austin article crediting Austin as the phrase's birthplace, which provoked a genuine backlash from San Antonio, an online petition drawing over 1,600 signatures demanding the writer's "exile" for "taco negligence." Journalist Gustavo Arellano, author of Taco USA, put his finger on what the argument was really about: "San Antonio has always been a Mexican city compared to Austin's lily-white image," a city whose own longstanding Mexican-American food culture, Tacodeli, Tamale House, had been made invisible by a segregationist urban-planning history and was now, in the taco war's telling, about to be credited to someone else's city. Historians agree the true origin is too diffuse to give to one place; San Antonio, Corpus Christi, McAllen, Brownsville and Laredo all have a real claim. CNN Travel

Read the history

As tradition built it

Serves 4. About 20 minutes.

Ingredients

4 stale corn tortillas, torn into rough pieces
2 tbsp lard or vegetable oil
½ white onion, diced
1 tomato, diced
1 jalapeño, diced
8 eggs, beaten
to taste salt
100g grated cheese
8 flour tortillas, warmed

Method

Fry the torn corn tortilla pieces in the lard until just crisping at the edges, not fully crisp.
Add the onion, tomato and jalapeño and cook for 2 to 3 minutes until softened.
Pour in the beaten eggs, season with salt, and scramble gently over low heat until just set, folding through the tortilla pieces as they finish.
Scatter over the cheese, let it melt through the residual heat, and roll into the warmed flour tortillas.

What a modern chef changes

The eggs' texture separated from the tortilla's crunch, rather than compromised together in one pan.

Rung uncited, a controlled-texture logic

Method

Cook the eggs sous vide at 63°C for 45 minutes to a soft, custardy curd, holding the tortilla pieces separately fried and genuinely crisp, so the two textures meet only at the point of eating rather than softening together in the pan.
Dehydrate the tomato and onion for a concentrated salsa dusted over at the end, adding a punch of flavour without the extra moisture a fresh dice brings to the egg.

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