Photo: Joshua Resnick (Shutterstock)
Hardshell tacos have a reputation for being “inauthentic,” an aberration of the form invented by a white fast food mogul named Glen Bell. (Can you guess which popular chain he founded?) And while Glen—and Taco Bell—are responsible for the hardshell taco’s massive popularity in the United States, not to mention the many spin-offs and riffs that deserve to be called “aberrations,” he did not earn the title of “Hard Shell Taco Inventor.”
As Andrew Fiouzi of MEL explains in “An Oral History of Hardshell Tacos,” there was no one “inventor” of the hardshell taco. According to Gustavo Arellano, author of Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America, tacos dorados—“golden tacos,” made with tortillas that have been fried until crispy—are considered by experts to be the inspiration for the ubiquitous hardshell taco now snaggable in drive-throughs across the country:
Tacos dorados is a hard shell pocket. That’s what it boils down to. So no one invented the hard shell taco — there is no ‘one’ creator. I know, people want to find the originator, but it’s really a confluence of all these different people capitalizing on what was already there. Actually, the first tacos in the U.S., they were all hard shell tacos. That was just the style of eating tacos that people brought up with them from Mexico. In fact, the earliest known recipe for a taco in the U.S. in English is a hard shell taco; it was in the L.A. Times.
You should read the entire oral history of the hardshell taco over at MEL, but the upshot is this: The hardshell taco deserves your respect. And that means showing it a little warmth.
A cold taco shell is a brittle taco shell
Every hardshell taco preparer knows the frustration of trying to pack in the ingredients without cracking anything, but there’s a way to make the process less fraught: Warming the shells beforehand gets the fats within moving and grooving, making them more pliable and less likely to shatter during filling (and eating).
It also makes them taste better, as warm fats taste better than cold fats, as they are able to move around your palate a little better. (Imagine eating a piece of toast with cold bacon fat spread on top, then imagine eating a piece of bread fried in bacon fat. Which one sounds more appealing?) Toasting the shells also brings out the sweetness of the corn, decreasing bitterness and wafting those nixtamalized aromas into the air. Place your shells in a 200℉ oven for a three minutes or so until they smell nice and toasty. Fill as usual (respectfully).
