Texas · Breakfast
Texas Breakfast Tacos
- Easy
- 30 min
- roughly 1 of 4 for cost
Leads with richness that coats and comforts, char used as punctuation.
Ingredients
- 8 flour tortillas
- 6 eggs
- 150g chorizo or crumbled bacon
- 2 potatoes, diced small and fried crisp
- 100g cheddar or Monterey Jack, grated
- Salt and pepper
- Salsa roja and pico de gallo to serve
Equipment
Grater / zester
The skills inside
Tortillas on the comalKnife cuts: dice, julienne, bias
The words inside
Allergen screen
Found: gluten · dairy · egg
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Fry the diced potato until crisp and golden; drain.
- Brown the chorizo or bacon in the same pan.
- Beat the eggs, pour into the pan, and scramble softly with the meat until just set.
- Warm the tortillas on a dry comal until pliable and slightly charred.
- Fill each with egg, potato, and cheese and serve with salsa and pico.
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the techniques it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Tortillas on the comal 27 recipes
- It puffs. On the second turn the tortilla lifts into a dome as the trapped water flashes to steam and splits the two faces apart; a tortilla that never puffs was pressed too thick, cooked too cool, or turned too often.
- Freckled, not blackened: small brown spots across a pale field. An evenly browned tortilla has been on too long and will be a cracker by the time it reaches the table.
- It folds without cracking while warm, and still folds after five minutes under a cloth. A tortilla that splits along the fold has lost too much water on the comal.
- The edges are unbroken and roughly round, with no ragged fringe: a fringed edge means the masa was too dry when it was pressed, and no amount of heat will fix it afterwards.
- It smells of toasted corn rather than of scorch or of raw lime. Raw lime means the nixtamal was under-rinsed; scorch means the comal was above the working heat.
Where it goes wrong The masa was too dry or the comal too cool. A dry masa cracks at the edge on pressing and cannot generate the steam that puffs it; a cool comal dries the tortilla through before the water can flash, so it leaves the heat stiff, pale and already stale.
Knife cuts: dice, julienne, bias 150 recipes
- Take any three pieces from anywhere in the pile: they match closely enough in every dimension that you would have to measure them to argue otherwise.
- The cut faces are flat and clean rather than ragged or crushed; leaves and herbs are cut through, not bruised, and the board carries no dark smear where they were.
- The stated size is the actual size, held against a rule or a known reference rather than called about right.
- Everything in the pile is the shape that was asked for: no wedges, no half pieces, and no offcuts swept in to avoid waste.
- They cook evenly, which is the entire point: at the end of cooking nothing is still raw and nothing has collapsed.
Where it goes wrong The knife was dull, or the vegetable was never squared off first, so the pieces vary: the small ones are mush by the time the large ones are cooked, and the dish has two textures where it wanted one.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Mimosa (weekends only)
- Also Right
- Cava, straight
- From the Taps
- -
- Zero-Proof
- Fresh orange juice & café au lait
Morning food wants brightness and bubbles, or honest coffee: nothing that argues before noon.
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