🇲🇽 Mexico · Family: El Taco Callejero · Region: Mexico City
Crisp pork skin and a steaming basket would seem to be at war with each other, and the taco de canasta de chicharrón is the truce. The chicharrón here is not the shattering, glassy snack you eat dry from a bag. It is chicharrón prensado or pressed pork cracklings simmered into salsa verde until the rigid pieces give up their crunch and turn soft, gelatinous, and deeply porky, the tomatillo sauce thickening around them into something between a stew and a paste. Folded into a tortilla, brushed with seasoned oil, and packed into the basket among its neighbors, it spends the morning going even softer and warmer, the green salsa keeping every bite loose.
What the steam-and-press treatment does to this filling is specific: it finishes a transformation the salsa started. The pork skin, once it has braised and then sweated for hours in the cloth-lined pile, becomes almost spreadable, rich with rendered collagen, and the corn tortilla around it absorbs both the chile oil from outside and a little of the green sauce from within. A good one tastes bright and sharp from the tomatillo against the heavy, savory melt of the skin, the two pulling in opposite directions in a way that keeps it from feeling like pure fat. The tortilla holds together long enough to get the taco to your mouth. A weak version skimps on salsa so the chicharrón stays chewy and the whole thing reads as greasy and dull, or it floods the basket with oil until the filling slides out and the tomatillo brightness is lost under fat.
At the corner it usually gets little more than extra salsa verde, a few rings of pickled jalapeño, and maybe a scatter of onion, since the filling is already sauced and assertive. People often pair it with a quieter potato or bean taco from the same basket to balance the richness across a couple of tacos. The seasoned oil that ties the whole stack together is exactly why one vendor's basket can hold this alongside adobo, beans, potato, and mole and have each filling still taste like itself in that soft, warmed, pressed frame. Each of those does something distinct enough that it deserves its own article rather than being crowded in here.
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Other El Taco Callejero sandwiches in Mexico: