Tlayuda
A 30-to-40-centimetre dried corn round, brushed with asiento, layered with black beans and quesillo, folded over a meat, and set back across the wood-fired comal until the cheese ropes melt.
Step into our Flatbread Sandwiches category - your passport to a culinary journey across cultures! Explore the world of sandwiches made with versatile flatbreads, such as the pocket-friendly Pita from the Middle East or the cheesy Quesadilla from Mexico. Learn how these breads, thin but packed with flavors, make for the perfect vessels for an array of fillings. Remember: whether it's enveloping a Gyro or getting toasted with cheese, flatbreads are the unsung heroes of the sandwich universe.
A 30-to-40-centimetre dried corn round, brushed with asiento, layered with black beans and quesillo, folded over a meat, and set back across the wood-fired comal until the cheese ropes melt.
The beef-led Oaxacan tlayuda: a white-corn tortilla past 40 cm, brushed with asiento, floored with black beans and quesillo, crowned with smoky charcoal-grilled tasajo, folded over the coals.
Of the Oaxacan tlayudas the chorizo one is the greasiest in the way you want: the sausage renders and its red fat runs down into the black beans, seasoning the base before you reach the meat.
Oaxaca's meter-wide toasted tortilla layered with asiento, black beans, and stringy quesillo, topped with thin chile-rubbed cecina grilled hard over coals, then folded over the heat.
Small fried rolled taco; diminutive, often served as appetizer or snack.
Mild ricotta-like requesón given its spine by epazote, the anise-and-tar herb cooks reach for when something bland needs a backbone. Soft or fried crisp, green salsa over.
Tacos de papa fill a corn tortilla with seasoned mashed potato, soft or fried golden as a dorado: cheap, filling, vegetarian by default, a fixture of Lenten Fridays.
A tortilla folded around a filling, eaten in the hand: the irreducible Mexican handheld, doubled for a reason and finished by a grammar stricter than it looks.
The wheeled mobile kitchen as institution: a vertical trompo, a flat-top, a tortilla warmer, a window, and three al pastor tacos out the gap in twenty seconds.
The hard-shell taco at its most loaded: seasoned beef and cheddar in a brittle fried corn shell, finished with cold sour cream and diced tomato. Taco Bell trademarked the name in 1978.
Sudado means sweated, and it is the recipe: a corn tortilla dipped in chile oil, folded around a stew, then steamed in the dark by two hundred of its neighbors in a closed basket through the morning.
Taco salad in shell: seasoned ground beef and salad layered into a deep-fried flour-tortilla bowl. An edible-vessel American Tex-Mex dish codified by Taco Bell in 1984.
A taco identified by its red sauce, the colour naming the dish before the filling does: tinga, picadillo, or red chile pork from the red pot of the Mexico City fonda counter.
The morning market taco of central Mexico: a warm corn tortilla folded around whatever guisado the cook stewed overnight, ladled hot from clay pots and eaten standing on the plaza floor in twelve.
Shrimp and melted cheese folded into a buttered tortilla and crisped on the steel. A Mazatlán restaurant invented it for the Sinaloa governor in 1987 and named it after him mid-meal.
The governor's taco with smoked marlin in place of shrimp: flaked cured fish in a tomato-chile guiso, melted into cheese and griddled in a flour tortilla. A Sinaloa coastal staple.
The shrimp-forward gobernador: whole shrimp with roasted poblano and onion, sealed in cheese and crisped in a flour tortilla. The version most of the world pictures by the name.
A corn tortilla folded over potato or picadillo and fried holding the pose: the taco dorado is fonda Mexico's crisp half-moon, dressed through its open edge with lettuce, crema, and salsa.
A central-Mexican vegetable taco built on verdolagas, the wild purslane that named a Hidalgo town and turns up in the Codex Mendoza, stewed in salsa verde and folded into warm corn.
Monterrey names the taco for its machine: a cone of smoked-paprika pork spinning at the taquería de trompo, shaved in long strokes, crisped on the plancha, folded into small doubled corn tortillas.
The taco de tripas is settled at the disco, where cleaned beef small intestine is browned until it crackles. Con dorar or sin dorar is the real argument, and the corn tortilla soaks the rendered fat.
Tripa de leche is named for the milk: the small intestine of a calf still nursing, mild and tender, the cut that becomes machitos. A gentler offal taco whose name carries its whole story.
Tinga is decided in the pot, not the fold: chicken pulled into threads and stewed in chipotle en adobo until it goes tart and smoky. Puebla's make-ahead braise, in print by 1881.
Beef brisket taco; suadero is the cut between belly and leg, slow-cooked in lard until tender, slightly crispy edges. Classic CDMX street...