Puffy Taco

At Ray's Drive Inn on San Antonio's South Side, a puffy taco begins as a disc of raw masa slid into a vat of hot oil. The water in the dough turns to steam, the disc hisses and swells, and within seconds it has blistered into a hollow bubble with paper-thin walls. The cook lifts it out while it is still slack and folds it into a curve, and the fold sets as the shell cools. The oil smells of fried corn, toasty and faintly sweet, and the smell drifts through the dining room long before a plate arrives. Seasoned ground beef goes into the curve, with shredded lettuce, chopped tomato and a handful of cheese on top. The folded masa closes around the filling on all sides but the top, and the whole taco weighs almost nothing in the hand.

The first bite is mostly sound. The thin wall shatters with a dry snap, shards drop onto the plate, and the thicker folds underneath are chewy, nearly bready, where the steam did less work. Warm beef slumps into the break while the cold lettuce and tomato push back against the heat of the shell. On the Mexican plate at Ray's, which also carries cheese enchiladas and carne guisada, the puffy taco goes first, because the crackle fades as the juice from the beef reaches the bottom of the shell. By the last bite the base has gone soft where the beef sat.

Timing at the fryer decides everything. Masa that is too wet tears as it inflates, masa that is too dry cracks along the fold, and oil that has cooled after a rush of orders turns the disc heavy and greasy. The cook has a window of a few seconds after the disc leaves the oil, when the shell is firm enough to hold a curve and soft enough not to shatter, and a fold that lands outside it either slumps flat or splits down the spine. Overfilled shells fail the same way at the table: the thin wall gives under a tall mound of beef and the first bite sends the filling into the plate.

The garnish has a job of its own. Shredded lettuce and chopped tomato go on cold, straight from the line, and they meet the steam still rising off the beef inside the shell, so each bite pairs heat with a wet snap of raw vegetable. Cheese melts into the top of the meat by the time the plate reaches the table. A puffy shell holds little, so the cooks keep the filling modest, a spoonful of beef and a pinch of everything else, and the taco arrives looking half empty and eating full because the hollow walls take up the rest of the room in the mouth.

Ray's is a low-slung building that carries the drive-in's lineage and turns out to be spacious inside, with a Lopez family kitchen behind the counter. Henry Lopez worked at Ray's as a young man before starting his own shop on Woodlawn in 1978, Henry's Puffy Tacos, which is why San Antonio now has two Lopez kitchens turning out the same hollow shell with slightly different hands. The fryer at either one puts out a fresh batch in minutes, and a puffy taco ordered at the counter reaches the table within moments of leaving the oil.

Origin and history

Ray Lopez opened Ray's Drive Inn in 1956 as a car-hop stand selling fried chicken, hamburgers and cold beer. His brother Arturo bought the restaurant in 1966, and the fried masa shell on the menu was reportedly known there as the crispy taco; "puffy" came into use later. Family lore places the first accidental puff with a grandmother, Maria Rodriguez Lopez, sometime in the early twentieth century, though no record dates it.

Other kitchens in the city make their own claims. Caro's says it invented the puffy taco the year it opened, and the Barrios restaurants say their mother, Viola Barrios, perfected it. The name itself was circulating beyond the Lopez family by June 1978, when a San Antonio restaurant called Teka Molino was listing "ever popular puffy tacos" on its menu in the San Antonio Light.

The claim that Ray's holds the original was set in bronze in 1992, when a plaque went up on the front counter, thirty-six years after the doors opened. By May 1992 the restaurant's sign read "Home of the Original Puffy Taco," in the same low building where the first drive-in trays went out in 1956.