At a glance
- Wrap: Steamed flour tortilla, rolled around the whole filling
- Hot core: Seasoned ground beef, beans, red sauce
- Cold finish: Shredded lettuce, diced tomato, sour cream
- Also inside: Cheese and diced onion
- Debut: 1975 on the Taco Bell menu, per most accounts
- Where: Taco Bell, United States (founded in Downey, California, 1962)
A steamed flour tortilla comes off the warmer soft enough to fold without cracking, and the Burrito Supreme starts there. Seasoned ground beef and beans go in hot, red sauce soaks into both, and then the cold ingredients land on top: shredded lettuce, diced tomato, a spoonful of sour cream. The whole thing is rolled shut and sealed in its wrapper, so the heat and the chill spend the next minute leaning on each other. By the time the paper comes off, the sour cream has loosened into the beef and the lettuce has gone from crackling to merely cool.
The first bite crosses every layer at once. The tortilla is warm and faintly sweet from the steam, the beef is salty with a chili-powder haze, the beans give a heavy, pasty body, and the sour cream cuts through it all with a clean tang. Diced onion adds a sharp crunch that the tomato softens, and the cheese has gone half-melted against the meat, gluing everything in place. Tilt the burrito and a little orange sauce slides toward the open end, so the last third of a Supreme usually eats wetter than the first.
Moisture decides whether it holds together. Beans that run thin or beef that sits in its own liquid will soak through the tortilla and tear it at the seam, and an under-rolled end lets the cold toppings fall out the bottom. A well-made one stays a firm cylinder, with the sour cream folded in the middle where it cannot pool against the wrapper. That is why the tomato is diced small and the lettuce shredded fine: both lie flat against the beef and share the load across the width of the wrap.
The name carries a menu convention that Taco Bell uses across its lineup. At the chain, "Supreme" is the label for sour cream and tomato added to a base item, and the Burrito Supreme shows it in its plainest form. The Crunchwrap Supreme borrows the same word for the same pair of cold toppings. Behind the counter that makes the burrito an easy build, since the crew pulls from the same bins of beef, beans, cheese and sauce used across the rest of the menu, and the only extra steps are the sour cream and the tomato. A Supreme can come off the line in the time it takes the steamer to release the next tortilla.
The burrito itself is older than the Supreme. The chain opened in Downey, California in 1962 under Glen Bell, and a plain burrito was among the items on the first menu. A Red Burrito built on beans and Taco Bell's chili sauce was on the menu from that first year, and a Green Burrito with green sauce and chili strips sat beside it in the 1970s. Those were bean burritos, soft and warm and plain. The Supreme put seasoned beef and the cold toppings into the same wrap, which turned a snack-sized order into something close to a full meal for a customer standing at the counter.
Origin and history
Most accounts place the Burrito Supreme's debut in 1975, when Taco Bell took its existing burrito and added seasoned beef, lettuce, tomato and sour cream to the beans, onion, cheese and red sauce already inside. Glen Bell still ran the company then; he sold its 868 restaurants to PepsiCo in 1978, so the Supreme belongs to the last years of the founder's tenure, a stretch when the chain was adding restaurants fast and building out a menu around a handful of shared ingredients. One copycat-recipe site puts the arrival closer to 1972, but the 1975 date appears in the larger share of menu histories.
No record names who designed the Supreme or who first proposed the sour cream. It arrived in a decade of rapid menu invention at Taco Bell: the Enchirito, which combined an enchilada and a burrito, was trademarked in 1971, and a 1974 promotion bundled a tostada, a bean burrito and a large drink for 59 cents. The Supreme joined that crowd as an ordinary menu upgrade, and the accounts that date it give a year but no launch event.
The earliest Supremes also carried sliced black olives, which were later dropped from the build, a change usually put down to cost-cutting. Black olives are the detail that dates the 1975 original, and the burrito the chain rolls today has no olives in it, so the beef, beans, sauce, cheese, onion, lettuce, tomato and sour cream now make up the whole spec.