I was somewhere recently, that had a sign that said you can't make everybody happy, you're not a taco. Which I loved, but it's so true!

I love beef, fish, chicken, corn tortillas, flour tortillas, and all kinds of toppings. I think I turn everything into a taco. Even if I use lettuce for a "shell". A perfect food.

John wrote what my favorites are: "street tacos" but I recently tried for the first time, Birra Tacos...Quesabirra -omg. Yes, please! But I also love crunchy corn taco shells (Trader Joes has great organic ones), with ground beef, tomato, pico de gallo, cabbage, black olives if I have them. Also love fish tacos with non-battered fish - a favorite local restaurant (seafood restaurant, not Mexican) makes great fish tacos with a choice of true cod, blackened rockfish or mahi-mahi and I like all three. So I guess, like gardengal, I never met a taco I didn't like.

I love a good corn tortilla but haven't had one since I visited my sister in Colorado years ago. Impossible to find here in southeastern West Virginia, so I always go for flour tortillas because the corn ones are cardboard. (And no, I'm not going to get into making them myself.) I find Tortilla Land raw flour tortillas that you slap into a hot ungreased skillet to cook fast are acceptable.

I miss good tortillas as much as I miss really good bagels, though Dave's Bagels are acceptable.

I love tacos in almost all forms, except ground meet or packaged taco shells. But my favorites are:

soft corn tortillas for tacos

proteins: barbacoa, carne asada, al pastor, carnitas, shredded or diced chicken, shrimp, fish (grilled or fried). ground meat is a no, it just falls out.

typically with pico de gallo or lime/cilanto/onion or for fish, cabbage with an option of a spicy salsa

love quesabirria with the nice thick broth for dunking

Crispy for me

Mostly my tacos are like Amylou's tacos, and yes to the sour cream. But occasionally I will make street tacos.

Hobbitmom I love your titling of this thread. Here's to hoping this thread informs and delights and while respecting each person's favorites, plants the seed for trying new styles if the opportunity arises, to boldly go where no taco has been before.

I'm indifferent to tacos, can take or leave them -- I'd rather have a good ham sandwich LOL!

We have several authentic Mexican restaurants in our area and I have discovered I much prefer Americanized tacos rather than authentic tacos.

Crunchy corn shells only, please. Rarely do I eat a soft tortilla. It’s a texture thing for me.

I can’t wrap my head around fish in a taco. Or chicken. Ground beef only. With sour cream, of course.

Yes, great thread! Let's hope it prospers.

I, too, prefer a burrito but tacos are a close second. Since I never make them myself, I let the experts make them. When I worked at our farmers market, we had a taco truck that would come. These people did healthy, organic ingredients only. They had shrimp tacos in a flour shell that were fantastic. I prefer the flour tortillas to the crispy corn. And for the most part, just about any ingredients will do. They are almost always good. I would say that chicken, pork and beef are my favorites, always with sour cream.

No to cilantro.

I always thought fish or seafood tacos were a no-go for me. Then one day, I tried the shrimp taco appetizer, oh it was so good, I ordered more to take home for DH. Then I went to a local taco restaurant with a friend who raved about their fish tacos. Maybe it was just that place, but they cooked my fish right then, perfectly, and it was delicious in the taco, soft wheat tortilla and toppings. I would get just the fish by itself, actually, but then I don’t get the toppings. At that place, I guess it’s all or nothing.

All sound great! I love the greeting card....did you know that taco cat spelled backwards is taco cat??

I'm not a huge taco fan, but the ones I will choose have soft shells, carnitas or carne asada, with corn, onions, and lots of cilantro. No cheese. Salsa verde or pico de gallo.

I’m with John regarding street tacos. Gotta have cilantro.👍🏻

I have no idea what is the difference between a taco and a street taco? A street taco is only bought from a food truck, ie on the street?.

Taco= meat seasoning shell condiments??

In reality, a taco is a sandwich using a folded tortilla as bread, and as variable as "sandwich" is. It's also as extendable. For instance, frybread taco is something you might come across in the West which is the frybread often found at Native American cultural centers' cafés, dented or slightly folded, with a ground meat filling in the dent. Taco is also the word for a certain kind of hair curler, because it's folded. That said, there are also rolled tacos.

Most tacos have a protein main ingedient, and there may be added vegetables and condiments. When I think "street tacos", it's a couple ladies on a corner with a brazier and a comal, though could also be a pushcart or trailer. There's a certain element of chance. A taco truck, easily found near constuction sites and other places there are a lot of workers and few food options, usually adheres to certain legal standards and are more like snack bars on wheels than real street food. Street tacos tend to be basic. Far fewer bits of vegetables and condiments, and they run to the greasy side, but they're often good eating.

Food varies from region to region in Mexico and so can differ widely from place to place if what they're making is true to their roots and not Americanized. There is no one type or style of taco or anything else to point to as the "typical" type.

What you can be sure of is that ground beef and crispy shells are unlikely to be found. If you like tacos from places like Taco Bell, what you're eating is Americanized and not authentic. The authentic stuff is much better and it's what I prefer.

In my areas, there are so many good and diverse sources of authentic Mexican food that for anything of a Mexican nature, including tacos, it isn't worthwhile to make them at home. Many busy places can look a bit sketchy or be in sketchy neighborhoods but the acid test is the taste and flavors, not the ambiance. I avoid places owned or run by gringos or those whose food isn't made in authentic styles. Sometimes you have to try what they offer to know if you want there to be a "next time", in the case of restaurants.

I've never run into the term "street taco". Maybe it's around and I haven't heard of it.

Street tacos are on the menu of some Mexican restaurants around us. To me the name usually means smaller “snack” tacos with a simple filling, such as maybe meat, onion and cilantro served with pico de gallo or salsa on the side. One serving is usually 2-3 tacos.

ETA - You can also ask for them if you don’t see them on the menu.

“A street taco is only bought from a food truck, ie on the street?”

Right. I think the idea was smaller tacos with simple fillings making them easier to eat while walking around.

So lets discuss "Authentic"

Food for thought

Most of the foods being discussed here for tacos is not Authentic if you mean original to the cuisine of parts south. The ubiquetious Cilantro is European for instance. No cheese since they did not have cows previous to the arrival of the despised European and of course no wheat. No lettuce, no cabbage. Oh no pork either or beef cow. No goat, no sheep I could go on and on. But having said that why not use these new foods and make them yours like polenta in Italy or tomato sauce. So they had corn and potatoes and tomatoes. Avocados are New World. All the chilis are authentic if that is how you want to divide up food. So the USian version of these foods is just as "authentic" as the foods based on borrowings used in Mexican and other cuisines further south.

Way back the people who came here to work in the fields mostly lived on corn tortillas wrapped about a wadge of beans with some chilis. It was cheap, filling, complete protein in the beans and nixtamalized corn for more vitamins. They must have been eating some of those chilis raw for the vitamin c.

No Elmer, I said why not use these foods and make them yours. That is what I said and what I meant.

The food of mexico and countries south is tody a mixture of New and old world. That is the point, which you seem to have missed, of what I was talking about. Authentic is not a real thing here. The history of humanity is the amalgam of all the additive history of food or anything else. I think we should celebrate the Amalgam. Instead of pointing out the non authenticness of something we should be saying how lucky we are that people in the

My own experience says that fast/cheap food can bend a dish into something unworthy. As I said up topic, the packed food era tacos taste good, for what they are. It's just that they don't compare to the "real" ones. I've seen it over and over, the surprise and delight when people (usually young ones) taste them, whether tacos, bourekes, or even salami.

Re "street tacos" in restaurants, I agree with Chloebud. Nowadays, restaurants are serving "tacos" with the works on 8-10" tortillas, to make them more like a meal of one or two. Street tacos are more like 4-5" tortillas, and in the street, you might hang round each gulping down one while the ladies make the next several, and eating 3-5 for a meal, or 1-2 for a snack. Street tacos can be delicious, and usually greasy, with lots of flavor all around, but not "toppings". It's this style of tacos they mean on a restaurant menu. They make up just as well on a flattop as a comal.

So, nothing is different . Just smaller, less vegetables, less toppings.!

So take your favorite meat and shell with nothing else and call it a street taco.

No thanks. I like mine fully loaded, any protein, all the toppings, with a Top Shelf Frozen Margarita. .

Sherry, they are really good. Usually handmade corn tortillas, and the meat (whichever you choose is very flavorful and is a bit juicy/saucy so the tortilla soaks it in a bit. Sometimes some sweet onion and a sprinkle of cotija cheese. A side of pico de gallo. Yum, my mouth is watering!

" The food of mexico and countries south is tody a mixture of New and old world. "

And present and past. And what's there is here in places and not in places.

Where in the modern world is that not true?"

I remember when we lived in Europe, there were Chinese restaurants in our city and we'd occasionally come upon the odd Mexican restaurant here or there in our travels. None of them ever even remotely served food that resembled restaurants of the same ethnic origin in the US.

There was a very casual place in town that (oddly enough) offered what it called "American style BBQ pork ribs". This was not a country where English was a national language. What I can say about this place is that the ribs were pork, the taste was enjoyable, but what they served had nothing in common with what the description would lead the average American to expect.

Was it "authentic"? No. And in this case, it didn't need to be.

I still like lettuce, tomato, salsa, sour cream, onions, olives, and so forth on my tacos.

I hope I don't cause any of you cardiac arrest when I say, as old as I am, I have never had a taco or burrito in my life. Granted, I grew up in a white bread town, but I did leave for college at 18 and never returned. There are many Mexican restaurants within a small radius of my home. I just don't like Mexican food. I eat Chinese every week( had it tonight) and also like Indian, Thai, and Italian food.

No shade thrown here. I do like Mexican, Chinese and Italian, but don't care for Indian or Thai. Also from white bread roots.

I have a friend who is of Indian descent and I walk her dog two days a week. We have become good friends. In the beginning, she tried to cook for me and honestly I don't like Indian food. I finally told her I come from a "white bread" background and not interested in Indian food. She took no offense, I am happy to say.

I was thinking how much you didn't really need the protein, because there are so many other things you could add to it, and there are amazing recipes for vegetarian or vegan tacos. Love and lemons really had it covered! With all the spices, and all the vegetables we add to tacos I don't know that you need the meat? It's the flavor that counts

https://www.loveandlemons.com/vegetarian-tacos/

No reason not to do vegetarian or vegan if that's your thing, though usually they have TVP or similar, pure veggie works great. To me, who eats a lot of veggies, a taco has a core of meat/protein, and likely at least a little greasy. If it's all veg, I'd rather have bread than the tortilla.

My special treat is to go to the Mediterranean Bar at my local supermarket and create a sandwich with the marinated veggies--artichoke hearts, roasted peppers, mushrooms, olives, sun-dried tomatoes--and maybe throw a slice of mozzerella or provolone on the roll. Heaven for me.

If you took the argument about a cuisine before the introduction of non-native ingredients each country would be left with a much smaller range of flavors and different recipes for iconic dishes. When I travel to a new region or try a new dish, I am reminded often how an iconic dish may have not existed before the age of exploration and travel (New World, Spice Route, and before that, mariners), as so many ingredients originated in a distant land. Given the prior logic about "american" versus "mexican", you could easily argue that most of the dishes are just "mexican", because they come from parts of the US that were originally part of Mexico.

Back to the topic of hand, I sometimes see the reference to "Mexico City" style street tacos at local taquerias or food trucks, with doubled up layers of 3.5" corn tortillas, often just with meat and maybe the cilantro/onion/lime garnish.

it would be interesting to do a deep dive into what the actual native people were eating in the Americas back in the day. I actually looked up whether or not you could make cheese out of Llama milk which is yes but did anyone ever do that in the past, apparently no evidence that they did. The native goats and sheep were never domesticated. I have frequently read that Barbecue came from the islands of the Caribbean islands but the problem with that is they had nothing big enough to do that to since they had no large or even medium animals-big fish maybe? And no metals for a grill. I am going to have to look this up. Thanks for making me think of it.

We are blessed by having a large local Hispanic population due to the good paying high end agriculture here. Seed crops and bulbs and such. So we have an amazing variety of foods. Great mole at any old cafe kind of thing.

Murrysmom, those look fabulous.

Yes, but it was not called Barbecue. It was called roasting.

Actually open fire is not used. That sets your food on fire and covers it with smuts. It would be over coals or next to coals or even fire when it is indirect but ideally coals. I would agree that cooking in this way is bound to be the original source of what we now call Barbecue but lots of websites will tell you it was from Caribe island people.

FWIW, I understand that depictions of ancient peoples always roasting meat over open flames is not accurate, and that boiling was a much more common cooking method.

Ah Elmer there is technically a difference between coals and charcoal in how it is made. Charcoal is produced in an oxygen poor environment and is lighter and makes very little smoke while coals from a wood fire is denser. I was startled to see in Scotland that they cut their kitchen fuel into short chunks all the better to make coals with for cooking. It was traditional.

Carol is right about pictures of people cooking are generally wrong. You do not hang your pot over a fire and fireplaces were large and often with high hobs so you could make multiple piles of coals to cook at different temperatures. Trivets or brandreths were used to put pots on more often than pots hanging from hooks. They used to make brick or rock surrounds to hold cauldrons so they fires under the pots without the smuts and also had smaller ones build counter top high to use charcoal that were not ventilated. I could go on and on but wont.

Oh, you make your own coals. I do this to roast chicken-it gives a wonderful flavor. Alder wood.

I get the newspaper staff breakfast tacos every Wednesday after the paper is sent to press. I can't stand eggs, so on mine I get refried beans, a slice of bacon, cheese and cilantro on homemade corn tortillas. The restaurant I get them from has the most wonderful salsa. I have asked for the recipe many times but I'm sure it'll go to the grave with "Grandma" who does the cooking.

I don't trust repetition by websites for individual facts because those are often disseminated from a single source, which makes it more likely to be wrong, but I do trust the OED, and have no reason to doubt this OED quote from Wikipedia, where the process of oneupsmanship threshing the chaff off of determined editors makes it fairly accurate, if limited: "The Oxford English Dictionary(OED) traces the word [barbecue's origin] to Hispaniola [my note: one of the great many islands where Taino was the dominant language] and translates it as a 'framework of sticks set upon posts'" -- which would hold the food over the fire. It also gives first citation (first known written form of the word) as 1661, which is long after the introduction of goats, etc., to the Caribbean.

FWIW, there a number of good YouTube channels about historical cooking - I like Tasting History, English Heritage, and Early American.

My information predates the internet.

I will also say that the reason I resist this is you cant barbecue meat on a wood grid over a fire. You can make sqewers of wood and put your meat on those because the meat would protect the wood but otherwise it would definitly catch on fire. Since it is a rare European who accurately depicted anything native people did I rest my case. In the PNW local people planked fish by attaching the meat to split cedar planks with withies of wood but they were stood on end around the coals, not over them. I have seen Salmon cooked this way.

Anyway the so called historical claim is that wood grid was how the Carib people were cooking meat over fires BEFORE European arrived and as I have said they had no large game of any kind nor could it possibly work. People did used to dry fish on wood grids over smoldering fires but I sort of doubt they would be preserving fish by drying in the Caribbean.

What were Europeans doing in Europe to cook meat, not in water, before visiting the Caribbean? For centuries and centuries?

Europeans relied on spit roasting for cooking meat.

I haven't done it, but I've read instructions for making just such a wood barbecue as described as being used by the originators of the word. I'm pretty sure this kind of setup was used all over. You use green wood, preferably hardwood, but at least not pine or other high resin wood, and, of course, you make a good cook-fire, not a flamy one. It doesn't last forever, but neither does a basic pit oven or any other ad hoc cooking arrangement. Whether you're "grilling" a decent sized fish, reptile or small mammal, or having a feast and grilling a goat, it can be done.

Fish tacos! crunchy corn tortilla, crunchy fish, shredded cabbage, pico without cilantro, and crema. Favorite because I can't get them just any time.

Ladypat1,

This is the fish taco recipe I used and the pico de gallo. I used flour tortillas, because hubby does not like crunchy corn. I used frozen cod loins from Publix. The pico is very good, just leave out the cilantro. I like all of Elise’s recipes from this site.

https://www.simplyrecipes.com/recipes/fish_tacos/

https://www.simplyrecipes.com/recipes/fresh_tomato_salsa/

I live in a Dominican neighborhood, though still plenty of Mexicans and some good taquerias. No olives or cheese to be had. A few will ask white people, when ordering, if they want gringo tacos, meaning with cheese or sour cream. But most do not. All tortillas are corn around here.

I am also fortunate to have a large and thriving multi-cultural migrant community due to our largely agricultural area. Food trucks and small local restaurant serve everything from empanadas to pupusas to elote to tacos, with a dose of cajun tossed in.

I also am not a fan of Indian food, although many others love it. I don't care for curry, whether hot or sweet and have what Alton Brown calls "weenie hot mouth" so most Thai is just too spicy. Some local food trucks have learned to moderate the heat levels for people like me and some have not, and it's up to me to learn the difference, LOL.

I do like tacos but am not for the texture of any flour tortilla I've ever had, including the locally made fresh ones and the ones I've made myself. I know I'm going to get the endless you just haven't had them made right, or the good ones, or whatever. I like corn tortillas better but won't turn down a good burrito and truthfully, the beans and rice is always my favorite order. I also don't care for cheese or sour cream so always get my taco "Mexican style" which here is fresh cilantro and chopped onion.

I also see very little difference in a taco and a sandwich and fry bread was common in my childhood, usually eaten with some kind of venison chili.

I do not like ham so no ham sandwiches for me although members of my family love glazed ham and I make it on holidays for everyone else.

Annie

“I know I'm going to get the endless you just haven't had them made right, or the good ones, or whatever.”

Annie, I can really relate. It’s the same for me with tamales. I just don’t like them, even the so-called ”best.”

Hah! I was wrong, you can roast meat on wood. I actually ran across a picture of a couple of men cooking what is probably sheep or goat somewhere probably in Europe who have a narrow trough like thing in a solid floor bridged by wood branches. They are putting coals underneath. No flame. Based on the clothes it cant have been before the 1950's but the branches dont even look charred. Still the only depiction of native people doing so is hopelessly inaccurate with a massive huge fire under a spindly sort of rack. It is like those depictions of 17 cNew England natives doing things that are mostly fantasy. I will have to give this a try and put my meat in a taco shell.

I am in the process of getting a new computer since Margaret P. shoved this one off the bed since it was in her way and it landed on one corner which was a bad thing and it keeps having spasms. Maybe I can post pictures with the new one. Not one of my strengths.

Well, yeah, I agree about the fantasy part of the bbq rack over a big flamey fire! Fantasy, for sure. The people of the 15th-17th centuries cooked with fire, no matter their origins or classes. Hm... I suppose it's possible that a few learned to harness escaping methane or similar gases escaping from the earth, like what made L.A. parking lots catch fire before they put vents in, but I think without the asphalt on top, and oil drilling nearby, that probably wouldn't have happened, either. So, that aside, most people, including Iberians and Taino, would have known how to make a cook fire, unlike those who made those illustrations. Is there anything people nowadays cook over high flames other than torched marshmallows?