Old Chef, New Trick

The last time I ate at Taco Bell would have been when my daughters were tiny young things. My eldest, Lillie, loved their bean burritos and would ask for them from time to time. And very occasionally, I would relent. You're beat; it's late and you're scrambling to get groceries after work; the kids are screaming; you know the drill!

Time flies and now that little girl is an internal medicine resident at a hospital in North Carolina. Seemingly without my noticing, it has been a very long time, a full generation or more, since I ate at Taco Bell (or for that matter, any fast food joint). As a consequence, I have no familiarity with their products, bean burritos aside, if even they sell such a mundane (although pure profit) item any longer.

Apparently in recent years, Taco Bell makes a thing called a crunch wrap, which according to hearsay is their biggest selling item, but one of which I have been woefully ignorant. Call me culturally illiterate.

Chipotle Black Bean Crunch Wrap

Ann and I first encountered crunch wraps at a local vegan food truck, a large flour tortilla folded to completely enclose a vegan filling and then the whole shebang browned on a flat-top. When I tasted Ann's crunch wrap, even though I wasn't enamored of the filling (not a huge fan of vegan cheese; sorry Tony!), I thought that the idea in itself might deserve to be permanently enshrined in the stoner-food hall of fame. 

Recently, Ann asked me to make crunch wraps for dinner so I made sure to get some really big flour tortillas at the store. Then, it was just a matter of making a decent filling (onion, poblano, cilantro stems, garlic, black beans, minced chipotle, cumin, New Mexico ground chile, salt, and Mexican oregano) and rounding up some other filling ingredients (cilantro leaves, sliced green onions, pickled jalapeños, grape tomatoes, and cheese).

The next step was to reverse engineer the fold to encase the fillings, which proved to be trivial. I understand that Taco Bell puts the crunch in the crunch wrap using a tostada that also helps stabilize the whole assembly.  For my part, I merely cut down a piece of flour tortilla to lay on top of the filling to give the large flour tortilla a good surface against which to seal. The whole thing folded naturally into a hexagon as if it were intended that way. I got it on the first try.

I didn't feel like it needed a tostada, but then, I'm not marketing to stoners and I don't need my crunch wraps to be stable for portability.

While my experience was trivial, I'm sure that the food engineers at Taco Bell spent countless hours determining how to fold the tortillas in a cost- and time-efficient manner such that their employees could knock them out profitably and consistently across all their stores. [My limited consulting with a large food manufacturer has shown me first-hand what a huge and involved process this is.] And no doubt, there is probably a patent or two lurking about the PTO to protect their product from commercial imitators.

Taco Bell: thanks for the idea! New trick for the old chef!

These stoner-food gems were so good, I confess to have made them two nights running, albeit with slightly different fillings each time.