Monday, July 13, 2009

Breakfast Tacos Atlantiques


“What, you make your own sandwich today?” Despite his skepticism, the server at Fatoosh was willing to accept my dollar in exchange for a single hot pita from the grill.

“It’s an experiment,” I explained. “We’re making tacos.”

If he was surprised that a thick, heavy pita would make anything that someone would call a taco, he had never had breakfast in Texas.

I should be a staunch supporter of Cali-Mex over Tex-Mex, but I have to say, those Texans have come up with some ingenious things to do with food. One such invention is the breakfast taco. Not to be confused with the breakfast burrito (though extremely similar in concept, no matter what any Texan argues), a breakfast taco is a flour tortilla folded around a combination of typical breakfast fare: sausage, scrambled eggs, potato, cheese – you get the idea. Refried beans and chorizo are also frequently combined with the more American breakfast-y components. It’s an idea that seems simple enough to imagine without having experienced the thing itself, but when I had one for the first time in San Antonio, my imagination had not prepared me correctly. What sets this creation apart from a standard “breakfast wrap” at any fast food establishment is the tortilla: it’s fluffier, chewier, more pillowy than any tortilla I have encountered outside of a breakfast taco context. It’s like a supple, downy bed for your eggs or beans or whatever to rest in as the world slowly wakes up. It’s amazing. And it’s a lot like the pita at Fatoosh.

At the moment, the breakfast taco market in New York remains undercapitalized as far as I know, and the key element, those flouriest of flour tortillas, has proven impossible to locate. So when I decided to recreate them at home, I turned to pita, which I suspected would yield a fairly close approximation, and which is certainly easy to find around here. I came up with two experiments to determine whether breakfast tacos on Atlantic Avenue were possible.

Experiment #1: With the Fatoosh pita that inspired the substitution, I made a version of the “Super Taco” at Taco Taco Café in San Antonio, with potato, chorizo, and cheese. Most restaurants seem to serve pocketless pita, which is chewier and more pliable than store-bought pita, and it seemed to work fairly well as a taco tortilla. The only problem is the size: the pita at Fatoosh is about fifty percent bigger than a regular Super Taco, which are already much bigger than the standard kind. So you really can’t handle more than one, and therefore don’t have the option of choosing different combinations of fillings. I’m searching for solutions to this problem, but I’m not sure the guys at Fatoosh are willing to make pitas of a specific size.

Experiment #2: Like all Texan ideas, I think breakfast tacos could benefit from a fresher, more vegetable-focused approach. This time I tested out a whole wheat Damascus pita, warmed in the oven and filled with spicy black beans, roasted zucchini slices, and tomato salsa. It was delicious, but not quite a breakfast taco – the Damascus pita was a little too dry and bready, and not quite stretchy enough, to create the taco’s signature textural experience. The beans and zucchini, however, were perfectly in keeping with the idea of Mexican comfort food. Next time I’m definitely including avocado (I thought it might be too assertively Californian for the first try). I’m also thinking of trying the packaged naan at Trader Joe’s, since the Damascus pita didn’t quite work out.

1 comment:

  1. Hi Kaitlin,

    I'm Katherine Ammirati's Aunt Kate and I just loved reading this. You've inspired me to be more inventive in the kitchen and experiment a little. Your writing's great and the photos are mouth wateringly good.

    ReplyDelete