🇲🇽 Mexico · Family: El Taco de Desayuno
Where the chorizo version of the egg taco adds fat and fire, the taco de huevo con nopales adds the opposite: brightness, tartness, and a little bite. It is the bare taco de huevo with cooked cactus paddle folded in, and the pairing is one of contrast rather than richness. Nopales, the trimmed pads of the prickly pear cactus, are mildly sour and slightly green-tasting, somewhere between green bean and tomatillo, and they cut the soft blandness of scrambled egg the way a squeeze of lime cuts a heavy filling. This is a lean, vegetable-forward member of the egg-taco family, and a common everyday and Lenten one.
The craft has two halves and both matter. The nopales are the harder of the two: the paddles are de-spined, diced or cut into strips, and cooked down until their natural slick viscous liquid, the baba, is driven off, usually by boiling and rinsing or by dry-griddling them hard, sometimes with onion and a tomatillo or two. Skip that step and the cactus stays slimy and the taco is unpleasant. Cooked right, nopales are tender-crisp, glossy but not gluey, faintly tart. They then go into the pan with beaten egg, which is scrambled low and pulled soft and glossy rather than dry, because dry, grainy egg loses the silky quality the cactus is meant to brighten, not rescue. A warm tortilla, corn or flour by region, is folded around the loose filling while it still flexes. The taco wants little more than a green salsa and maybe onion, since the nopales are already doing the lifting that fat does in the chorizo version.
This is the lean fork off the bare egg taco. Trade the nopales for crumbled chorizo and the partner flips to hot and greasy; trade it for diced potato and the taco turns starchy and mild. The cactus itself ranges far beyond this one pan, dressed cold in ensalada de nopales, grilled whole as nopales asados, simmered into stews, each preparation drawing out a different side of the same paddle, and that wider life of the nopal deserves its own article rather than being crowded in here.
More from this family
Other El Taco de Desayuno sandwiches in Mexico: