🇲🇽 Mexico · Family: El Taco Callejero
Where the plain taco de chicharrón is loud and crisp, the en salsa roja version is quiet and soft, and the difference is the entire point. Here the pork skin is not preserved for crunch; it is sacrificed to the salsa. Shards of fried chicharrón go into a simmering red chile sauce and stay there until they surrender, drinking up liquid, swelling, and turning into something tender, glossy, and almost gelatinous. The result is a guisado, a stewed filling spooned into a tortilla, eaten with a slight lean-forward so the sauce does not run off your wrist. It is breakfast food and comfort food, the kind of taco that anchors a market stand's steam-table lineup.
The braise is the craft. A red salsa is built from dried or ripe red chiles, often guajillo or árbol with tomato, garlic, and onion, blended and let down with broth or water to a loose, brick-colored gravy. The chicharrón goes in and the pot is held at a low simmer; the cook is watching for the moment the skin has softened through but still holds its shape, before it dissolves entirely into the sauce. Done well, the pieces are yielding and silky, the salsa clinging and deeply chile-scented, the pork fat enriching the whole pot. Done poorly, the skin is either still rubbery in the middle because it went in too late, or it has melted into a uniform paste and lost all identity, and the salsa is thin and harsh from rushed cooking. A fresh, soft corn tortilla is essential, doubled if the filling is especially wet, because this taco has no structural crunch to lose and everything to gain from a tender wrap that soaks up a little of the red.
Within the braised branch, the choice of salsa is what splits the road. Tomatillo instead of red chile yields chicharrón en salsa verde, tangier, greener, and brighter on the tongue, though the technique and the soft texture are nearly identical. The crisp original, meanwhile, behaves like a different dish entirely, all shatter and no spoon. The wider universe of Mexican guisado tacos, the stewed fillings that fill steam tables every morning, is large and regional and deserves its own article rather than being crowded in here.
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Other El Taco Callejero sandwiches in Mexico: