Navajo Taco

The fry bread for this sandwich is dropped into hot lard while the customer is still at the window. Soft wheat dough, mixed from flour, salt, water, and a leavening agent and rested only briefly, is pressed by hand into a round about the diameter of a dinner plate. A vendor in Window Rock or Shiprock or at the booth outside the Hubbell Trading Post in Ganado heats lard or shortening in a deep round pan to roughly three hundred and seventy-five degrees Fahrenheit, drops the disc in, and watches it puff into a blistered, chewy circle with a crisp edge and a pillow center inside of about ninety seconds. Onto that fresh hot round go the toppings, open-faced and high. The carrier is not a tortilla heated on a comal but a hot fried bread the cook makes for this single order, and that decision shapes everything that lands on top of it.

The dough chemistry rewards a soft hand and punishes haste. Bread mixed too stiffly seizes in the pan and comes up dense and oily, the inner crumb gummy instead of airy. Dough left to rest too long or proofed warm develops too much gluten and turns chewy past the right elastic give, dragging at the teeth and refusing to break clean. Fat below temperature soaks the round before the surface can set, and the bread arrives saturated and heavy. Fat above temperature browns the outside in seconds while the inside stays raw, and a bite into that round meets a wall of doughy interior. A round held even thirty seconds past the right pull goes leathery and a knife will not part it cleanly.

The topping order is calibrated to a hot, fat-soaked, absorbent base. Seasoned ground beef (sometimes mutton, sometimes Hatch-chile-stewed shredded beef) goes down first while the round is still putting off heat from the fryer, and the meat keeps its rendered fat on the surface where the bread can drink it. A spoon of slow-cooked pinto beans, with their own sauce, lands next and softens against the meat. Then the cool layers go on, in a deliberate sequence: cheese first so it slumps slightly under the warm meat, then shredded iceberg, then diced tomato, then sometimes pickled jalapeno, then a ladle of mild green chile from the back of the stove. A spoonful of salsa or hot sauce sits on top. Each layer is structured rather than soft and wet, because a fry bread already carrying its own fat will go to pieces under a saucy build.

The smell off a stand is hot fat and chile and the sweet wheat of fried dough, and the sound is the crackle as a fresh round hits the pan and the second crackle as the next one comes out. The plate arrives warm in the hands, the fry bread giving slightly under the load, the cheese already going gold against the meat, the iceberg still cold against the tomato. The first bite is the surface, crisp and salty, then the layers, and the round below has soaked through with rendered fat and meat juice into something half-bread half-soaked-pastry. By the third bite the round is folding under the load and the hands are involved; by the last bite it is fork work, picking the soaked center out of the basket and finishing the chile that has pooled at the bottom of the plate.

The naming and the setting are inseparable from the recipe. On the Navajo Nation it is the Navajo taco, signaling the local fry-bread base; in much of the wider American Indian Country it is the Indian taco, the broader category covering Lakota, Apache, Hopi, Cherokee, and Choctaw versions that change the meat, the bean, and the chile to the local pantry. Order one at the Navajo Nation Fair in Window Rock in early September and the booth will ask whether you want red or green chile and whether you want beef or mutton; order one at a roadside stand on U.S. 191 outside Chinle on the way to Canyon de Chelly and the answer is whatever the pot at the back of the trailer has in it. The Albuquerque Indian Pueblo Cultural Center serves an Indian taco that is the same form built on the cuisines of New Mexico's nineteen Pueblos.

The variations stay inside the fry-bread frame. The dessert version is the sweet reading, hot bread topped with honey and powdered sugar or with cinnamon, and is the form most non-Native diners meet first at a state fair. The Lakota taco is the South Dakota reading on different bread; the Apache version closer to a stew on a round. A folded handheld version closes the round around the load like a turnover for travel rather than serving it open on a plate. The wider American taco-and-burrito family runs an identical fillings on different bread (a soft tortilla, a crisp shell, a flour wrap, a torta roll) and each is a separate sandwich on a separate carrier, and each gets its own piece.

Fry bread and Bosque Redondo

The fry bread itself dates to a specific, documentable historical event, and its history is the history of forced removal. Between 1864 and 1868 the United States Army, under Brigadier General James H. Carleton and Colonel Christopher Carson, forcibly marched roughly eight thousand five hundred Navajo people from their homelands in northeastern Arizona and northwestern New Mexico to a reservation called Bosque Redondo at Fort Sumner, in eastern New Mexico, in what the Navajo Nation calls the Long Walk. On a barren reservation that grew almost nothing the army issued rations: white flour, salt, sugar, lard, and powdered milk, distributed weekly out of the post commissary.

Fry bread is the Navajo response to those rations. Confined to a high-plains site where the traditional Navajo agricultural staples (corn, beans, squash) could not be grown and where the sheep that had been the basis of Navajo food culture had been killed, women cooking in camp combined the issued flour, salt, water, and lard into a flat dough and fried it in the issued lard, producing a bread that kept the eater fed on what was on hand. The 1868 Treaty of Bosque Redondo released the Navajo to return to a portion of their original homeland, and the bread that had been invented in captivity went home with them and stayed. It is now made, sold, and contested across roughly twenty-seven thousand square miles of the Navajo Nation.

The taco form on top of the bread is twentieth-century and emerged in mid-century roadside food across the Southwest. The standing public credit is to Lou Shepard, a cook at the Navajo Lodge in Window Rock, who in 1964 layered ground beef, beans, lettuce, and cheese on a fresh fry bread for tourist diners headed to the new Navajo Nation Fair. The Navajo Nation Tribal Council adopted fry bread as the official Navajo Nation bread by formal resolution in 2005, and the Navajo taco appears on every fair menu, trading-post grill, and family kitchen on the reservation from then forward.