/ck/ - Food & Cooking

I've got a few authentic mexican restaurants around here and a late night Taco Bell / Taco Bueno
I enjoy all pretty much equally.
Sometimes I want delicious soft shell goodness or steak fries.
And sometime I want retardedly fried chalupas and nacho cheese burritos

Left = snack
Right = Meal

How come we bastardize everything when we try to change it? Or maybe it's just the immigrants who come here and are too poor to make a complete version of their foods from back home.

Too bad the street taco has been seized by hipster joints and fucking food trucks and made into a $3 item. I'd rather eat the Taco Bell at this point. At least it costs what it should cost.

I usually pay 2.50 for tripas tacos I think that's fair

Everything American when it comes to culinary pisses me off. A lot of the people I've seen are like liberal arts students who are overly serious about their work and are difficult to work with these kids with sticks up their asses, even when I know more than they do

>>3746174
>hipster joints
Fuck that shit go to a Mexican restaurant

>food truck
It's America, it's probably a fucking rarity to see fast food other than your local chains

I love eating mexican tacos from the oaxaca food truck parked across the street. I also love crunchy tacos from Taco Bell. They are both delicious and both serve their purpose. There's nothing wrong with either unless you are gonna act autistic and accuse a crunchy taco of being "fake". It's fucking food and its delicious.

>>3746192
Uh "gourmet" food trucks are all the rage in American cities. $9 for a burrito and $2 for a can of soda.

>>3746194
Well cheap ground beef grosses me out and so does that fucking red sauce they put all over everything.

>>3746194
/thread

Real tacos are delicious, and so are shitty taco bell "tacos". Depends on time of day/mood/amount of weed smoked

>>3746192
>overly serious about their work

You're being pretty vague. Cooking is a fast paced job so it's not like they have plenty of time for joking around. But if you're being treated like shit, then quit as soon as you find a better job.

Better yet: try not working at a restaurant that gets it's ratings from a tire company.

>>3746200
$2 for a can is cheap for Australia. $2.50 minimum at a venue like that.

>>3746194
They both taste fine. It's just how completely different they are that bothers me

American cheese and ground beef vs the shit on the right and I'd always go with the one on the right. You can do the one on the right and still be fast food, Taco Bell is just a load of donkey dick

I fuck mexican women pretty much exclusivly so I eat a lot of somewhat authentic mexican food. I hate when tacos are covered in cilantro though, I'd much rather have one of those peice of shit 2 for a dollar Jack in the Box tacos than one of those.

i miss texas

fuck you

food from taco bell is authentic mexican food. it gets the job done for half the price, that's about as mexican as it gets

Aside from that, Mexican cuisine is growing fast in the US and I like it. There are independent joints here in south florida all over the place, and they're so fucking good. I had no idea corn tortillas were so much better than flour tortillas. Also, any joint worth their salt has taco tuesdays, so that's a quick and cheap lunch at least once a week.

>>3746220
I don't know where you live, but when tacos have too much cilantro I assume it's because you can get anywhere from 3 to 7 bundles of it for 99 cents here in SoCal depending on the sales.

And WTF can anyone do with that much fucking cilantro?

>>3746146
Look at all that fucking grease...

>>3746237
I'm in the bay area. There was this ghetto taco truck that set up outside my work a few times when I was at my last job. I had it a few times but all the tacos tasted like was cilantro and I hated it. Usually everyone would just give me money and send me off to Jack in the Box to buy 40+ tacos.

>eating Mexican food
>Not eating superior Tex-Mex food
>2012
>I shiggy diggy doo higgy

>>3746258
>Usually everyone would just give me money and send me off to Jack in the Box to buy 40+ tacos.

no they don't because your coworkers have more class than you and don't have your genetic predisposition to hate the taste of cilantro.

>>3746242
That's called meat juices from the seasoned meat that Americans can't do into

not long ago i worked at a place that was 100% middle aged/elderly straight up mexican immigrants. i was the only white guy that worked there. halfway through our shift at lunch break we would all break out our change and one of us would drive to jack in the box to buy as many tacos as we could afford that day. we worked produce so we had the freedom to add any veggie additions that we wanted. i was the only one that added seranos and other chili peppers to my tacos and i'm white as fuck, the "beaners" added green leaf lettuce to the taco if they added anything extra. i don't really understand this whole authenticity and stereotype thing. i'm sure my coworkers made some awesome homemade tacos at home but at the same time they also enjoyed "amerifat" tacos like the rest of us. and never once did they talk shit on our fake tacos like some of you guys do. they actually talked shit on the rich white people that try to adhere to the "authentic" mexican shit that they know nothing about.

what the hell is wrong with you elitists? you are pretending like you have highbrow tastes and only eat the realest mexican food, but if you understood mexicans at all you'd realize that they fuckin laugh at people like you.

>>3746266
>Thinking Tex-mex is superior
>2012

>>3746192
America invented a lot of great food and really pioneered fusion. Also, soul food. Does your shitty ass country even HAVE fried chicken and waffles? No? Fuck you. You're a culinary fucking wasteland.

>not living in the southwest where its easy to find

>>3746315

>implying it isn't

Tfw I live in socal and have a plethora of taco shops. They only cost like 80 cents a taco.

>>3746746

Do you have korean/mexican fusion taco places? There are like 3 near me

>>mfw they tried to make the cantina tacos at taco bell

Shit sucked and failed miserably.

Last time i tried food with meat when i was on vacation in mexico i got the biggest diarrhea in my life.. it fucking ruined half of my vacation there
so you can keep your mexican taccos you beaner scrub

>>3746759

>going to mexico and actually eating the food there

Did you drink the water, too? It's like you have a death wish.

>>3746759

lmao weakass

What's the matter silly gringo? A little bit of dust fell in your food?

>>3746783

haha ha
haha
hahaha
aah
a aahah oh god why is 4chan so funny today

Taco bell is leagues better than any messican taco made with rotten goat's ass or whatever the hell is in there.

>>3746759
whats in the water in mexico anyways?
i always hear about this and i always wanted to test my stomach.
i feel like i could handle it

also crunchy tacos are better

>>3746797

It's nothing special. Water tastes heavily mineral-ish.

At high amounts that shit can cause kidney stones but only if you drink it regularly.

Then again, what kind of idiot would drink from faucets all the time.

>>3746804
me

ITT we ignore a long, shared culinary tradition between what are now the United States and Mexico--one of which used to be a sizeable part of the other.

>hurr tex mex isn't a real cuisine

I've been to mexico. There are not enough flies in OP's pic to be a real Mexican taco.

>>3746797

It's not necessarily the water in Mexico, it's just water in foreign countries. Your body builds up an immunity to whatever shit is in the water, so when you go somewhere new, you're defenseless to all of the things people of that country take for granted. I'm sure it works the same way with foreigners who come here and drink our tap water.

>>3746811

From north to south:

American fastfood
TexMex
Mexican cuisine

texmex is just the middle ground, a fusion between the two.

Also, bastly superior to american food.

>>3746797
its because their water treatment facilities are nonexistent so their shit water just re enters the drinking pool without being properly cleaned

I think its cute how mexico puts grilled meat on a flat bread and lays claim to it by giving it a cute little name. The american crunchy taco is more unique than that grilled shit that everybody in the world has some version of.

>>3746818
mexico is a special kind of filthy, if you go on vacation there they advise you to not even brush your teeth and to wear swim suits in the shower, you dont even need to drink their water because it will make you sick just by touching a mucus membrane

>>3746825
Truth.
I don't think people understand how dirty mexico really is.
I cringe when I see some hipster douche TV personality happily munching away at some dish prepared in a backstreet dumpster in some mexican ghetto.

>>3746291
Um, he said everyone would give him money, not that the company would give him money.

Everyone else probably hated the taste too and said "hey, anon, would you mind driving down to JITB to get us some tacos? those tacos from that truck taste like shit"

>>3746797
>>3746804
>>3746815
>>3746818
>>3746821
>>3746825
>>3746830

ITT: Weak stomachs.

Wow, Mexican street food is just fine, in fact its way better than anything one can get here in the US. And if you think you shouldn't eat the street food or drink the water in mexico you should probably never go to India then.

>>3746146
>Have you tried a Mexican taco lately?

I fucking would if I could get one in Canada.

>not enjoying a proper mexican taco with a mango jarritos soda
>2012

>>3747517
Replace that Mango Jarritos with a Jarritos Fruit Punch or Tamarind and you've got a deal. Fuck, I love street tacos and Jarritos. And then a coconut helado and I'm in heaven.

Dudes, dudes, chill. Taco is not a dish, its a form of presentation. There are literally millions of kinds of tacos in mexico and in the us. Now, there are some trends, heavily depending on geography. Some are great (the more you go south, the better), some not that great:

- baja fish and shrimp tacos: greatest things on earth. No, they are not invented in san diego, but hey, believe what you want. I just dont see a border in cali anymore. This is fish or shrimp tempura, fried with a bit of bacon grease and a lot of oil, with lots of guacamole and like a billion salsas to choose from. People enjoy them with cream and mayo.
- baja/sonora prime meat taco: excelent god damned way to serve great sonora corn fed organic meat. Also is served with a bazillion of salsas to choose from, but usually on a great flour mexican tortilla, that has in its dough mixed some pork grease as well. If youve ever tried this, you are crying in joy from the memory right about now.
- chilango tacos al pastor: those red things they turn around and around, slice at them and put the pork meat in a small corn toetilla, acompanied with pinapple (if done right), and a wonderful very spicy salsa....

And well, we mexicans put anything in a tortilla. So if you go to the paciffic coast, youll get octopus tacos al-pastor, if you go north, you get variations of the beef tacos up there...and so on.... But anyhow, the point its that itsnnot a dish, just a presentation.

I mean, you gringos make some horrendous tacos. But i still respect you guys enough to call them that.

>>3746330
american cooking is usually unfairly portrayed. This is true. But mexican is, my friend, one of the most complex culinary cultures in the world. I could not even begin to describe you what it takes to make a cochinita pibil, a mole negro, or even the very common pozole broth. We are speaking hundreds of ingredients, chocolate, stone grinded spices, extremely complex procedures. Traditional mothers in mexico start cooking wendsday to deliver saturday....

I work with mexicans.

They bring an old beat up microwave in their van and the shit they warm up is some of the best mexican food I've ever eaten. It's simple, yet highly refined and balanced.

They've got their comfort food down pat.

>>3747845

Agrd, Mexican is a highly evolved cuisine.

We Americans are kinda unlucky, we were colonized by and took most of our culture from some of the world's worst cooks. We were also particularly ruthless in stamping out the cultures of our native people, so we couldn't benefit from their cooking know how. We're slowly making up for lost ground, but on average, I'd say our housewives are woefully bad cooks when compared to those of most other cultures. This is exemplified by the stereotypes surrounding some of our more "old fashioned" dishes like meatloaf. Take the exact same ingredients and give them to an Italian grandmother and prepare to go into a pleasure coma.

Mexicans on the other hand somehow, someway manage to take some of the simplest ingredients and imbue them with incredible layers of flavor. Only Indian food really matches legitimate Mexican food (which you can only try if you know a Mexican lady) in depth of flavor in my opinion.

>>3746220
here is a tip from a mexican. Ask for your tacos "sin jardin", no garden please. Most mexicans will take that to mean without any veggies.

>>3747923
>not having onions on mexican tacos

gtfo

>>3748047
yeah, but then you say: sin jardin, con cebolla,,, and that works.

>>3747920
The native cuisines of most of north America were/are terrible with a few notable exceptions:
barbecue
jerky
cornbread
psimandoakan (sp?), a maple-sweetened corn-based candy-bar-like thing (no one eats it today, so far as I know, but I had to good fortune of tasting it at an AmerIndian festival in Philadelphia).
succotash
corn-based polenta

At that same AmerIndian festival, I tried a native stew of deer that was similar to paprikás, only swapping out the paprika powder for... blueberry powder... yeah. It had a weird, gross, wretched, awful, bitter-yet-sweet-but-not-in-a-good-way flavour.
Native foods tended to be absolutely wretched, and that's why they were allowed to die out.
Ever wonder why there are absolutely no Greenlandic restaurants? Now you know.

>>3748556
You forgot something

>>3748565
Never had it, so I didn't list it. I've yet to try Navajo food, but I hear it's pretty much the same thing as Mexican.

>>3748568
Not the same , a few things in common though. Fry bread is all over Indian country these days. I have never been to a pow wow that did not have it.

>>3748556
yeah well, the difference is that on the center and south of mexico we had big cultures with buildings and stuff and native americans in the north were still nomads, had no way to develop a sophisticated couissine. You get a divide in mexican food right in the middle of mexico. One of our great poets said: "Where culture ends, thats where grilled meat starts", signifying the cultural difference between northern and central-southern mexico.

He was right too. Mayan, aztec and all three of main oaxaca cultures where very rich in spices and ingredients. Add to that about 400 years of spanish convents and nuns and monks with nothing to do but cook and eat and you have a hell of a great couissine.

Fucking captcha is in hebrew...

"Real" mexican cuisine is leagues under the shittiest thing Taco bell can shit out.

>>3748964
alo mr troll, have a taco why dontcha...

>>3746174
>Implying that $3 is a lot for a taco

Holy fuck, no wonder so many americans are fat. Here I'd expect a small plate of tortilla chips for $3.

Did flags just disappear?

I ate tacos al pastor before it was cool to like mexican street food

>>3749867
I ate them before you were born, kid.

>>3749872
lol ok, grandpa

>>3749867
Fuck your Grados scrub.

>mfw the "mexican" taco looks something like the tacos we make at home, except greasier and with more meat and less veggies
also, we usually put in tomatoes, sour cream mixed with hot sauce or salsa, and avocado if it's on sale.
We're sort of poorfag, though, so it's usually just anything we have grilled up in a tortilla.

Do veggiefags last long in Mexico?

Is goat intestine vegetarian?

>>3750076
It depends. You can last a good while on rice, beans, peppers, fruit and squash and the like if you cook for yourself, but pretty much everything that's not very carefully constructed to be vegetarian is going to have some animal products in it because that's just how things are in Mexico. Those chips? There was lard in the oil. That rice? Cooked with beef broth. Corn and bean soup? Simmered with salt pork.

Something in "authentic" mexican manages to give me heartburn, I always cough up a really tomato-ish taste when I eat even tame shit like bean burritos, they also use way too much of that bland white cheese.
For that reason alone I prefer taco bell or some other fake stuff over it.
Only other gripe is I hate cilantro.

I'd take the taco on the left - the other stuff looks like greasy overcooked horse meat. Mexican food is shit tier.

>Tried to market to us
You do realize taco bell is making Tex-Mex food and that a lot of Mexicans like it as well? It's not really "fake". Nonetheless, a lot of people confuse it for straight Mexican food.

I love how in Brazil McDonalds also flops in a few towns because it came too late, and there are already too many non-franchise places where you can eat stuff 10 times better for half of their prices. From the 6 places I've lives, McDonalds had to close in 2 of them.

>>3750096
That is plain stupid. Mexican basic peasant food is 100% veggie and is aminoacid complete, to the point you dont need meat. In traditional precolumbine couissine there wasnt any beef before the spaniards got here, only birds and stuff they hunted and they ate dogs and people too, but then again, they didnt have those at walmart.

So this is the basic diet: nixtamal corn tortillas with salt, chile, and black beans. No animal fat at all.

Yes. You can get all the protein you need just from that. You will not get anemic, its complete and the cheapes shit you can get in mexico.

King tier

>>3751175
Nah, that's not the ancient diet. Do more research dude.

>>3751175
This is so dumb. Pre-Columbian cuisine was very sophisticated so much so that the Spaniards felt inadequate when they discovered the range and variety of the food that the natives had. Think of everyday stuff in the modern world that is from Mesoamerica: Corn, tomatoes, chocolate, vanilla, potatoes. I don't think there isn't a day in the American diet that doesn't have some corn-derivative substance. Then there are other things you never think about like that red dye from the concheal bugs that grow on cacti. They didn't eat just dog, or wild fowl, there were also fish, snakes (Aztecs where known for having survived on snakes when they took over Tenochtitlan), marsupials, and other wild animals you probably never heard of before such as tapir. Additionally they supplemented their diets with insects and other bugs. As for the fruits and vegetables, I bet there are so many of them that you don't even know about. They didn't just eat things they "hunted" or "gathered," they just had a different farming system than the Spaniards. Look up the milpa system where the Mayans actually had their farms as part of the forest. So when Spaniards looked for farms and couldn't find any because they were integrated into the forest, and they were self-sustaining.

As for the tacos, my only problem is when people don't put the filling on the right side of the tortilla.

>>3751214
Really, the abundant marsupials of mesoamerica? Do tell....

And yes, tapir and whatevs: they hunted, dindnt herd much. And yes, in the insects you are right, but i wouldnt count those as meat, would you?

I think we can agree that it was a rich, more veggie than animal based meal what the ancient american cultures had on a day to day bases, specially if they werent on the dominant class, right?

>>3751217
Tlacuache (possum) is a common and still abundant marsupial. You can't just group an entire cuisine and say that they were mostly vegetarian, it would all depend on region and greatly differ depending where one would live and their life-style. People from the coastal areas would naturally have (and still do) a more carnivorous diet consisting of all sorts of marine wildlife (fish, mammals, crustaceans, etc) as opposed to an agricultural area up north that depended more on grains and vegetables. Then there is the central and southern area that has abundant sources of animals (that they raised in their forest farms). By the time of the Aztec empire even the lower "tier" people had a balanced diet of meat and vegetables. They had such extensive and efficient distributions systems that you find exotic stuff from as far south as Peru, to as far north as Oregon and Canada. This all changed with the introduction of rice, and wheat from the Spaniards. It was after the Spaniards that meat obtained a higher "status" and the native cuisines where lost. But even then the lower classes were given the scraps or "bad parts" of the animals and thus you get traditional dishes like that disgusting tripe called menudo. So the answer to your last question would be; Depends where they were from.

>>3751229
Sorry the correct name in English is "Opossum."

>>3746228
zona fresca?

>>3751229
Well fuck me. You are right, the tlacuache is the only fucking marsupial in mexico, and i have one that fucks up my garbage every now and then as i live and was born here. One learns something new every day.

I think the tone lost us a bit. I didnt mean to say (read the thread), all the ancient mesoamericans ate just tortillas and beans. Really, my point is that tortillas, beans and chile is good enough as a vegetarian diet to survive.

Belive me, im a fan of mexican food. I just made tikinxic out of a parrot fish last week with actual yucatan recado rojo, im going to do some authentic chilmole next month. I just got carried away, didnt read my parent post and then you didnt read mine either that well or i didnt write it well or whatever.

What is inexcusable, is that you dont like menudo. You have no idea how to cure a tequila hangover then.

TL;DR I proclaim you right and declare myself wrong.

>>3751229
However, when was the last time you saw a domesticated tlacuache or snake? You should concede that the ancients down here didnt have a farm animal like the cow or pork. Tlacuaches, tapires were hunted, but guajolote (turkey) and xoloscuintle (a dog. A very ugly dog that is quite tasteful ive been told), well yes, those were domesticated, maybe even iguanas, although i would speculate, a bit on the expensive side on the chalco market if you catch my drift.

In fact, in the center of mexico, the heart of the aztec empire, the most traditional stuff is quelites(herb), huauzontle (herb), mushroom (setas) and deep corn fried stuff, the flower of the squash (flor de calabaza), huitlacoche (again, a musroom that grows on corn). And those are the main ingredients of the dishes.

I dont know, It just makes me think veggie... dont you think that richness in main dish ingredients being vegetable points to veggie? I do.

>>3751900
>Really, my point is that tortillas, beans and chile is good enough as a vegetarian diet to survive.

Not the guy that you're arguing with, but I don't think that was ever in dispute; I think this all started when >>3750096 said that most contemporary Mexican food has meat in it in some form or another (assuming, of course, that you're not going to be living in abject poverty) and I don't think that is necessarily wrong - most Mexican food that's not made by and for the absolute poorest of the poor is probably going to have some sort of animal products in it at least occasionally - lard, stock, "trash" cuts of meat, whatever.

>>3751913
It is... and you are right. I misread you as well. I thought you were saying there is no way to get veggie in mexico, but you said "if you dont cook yourself" and you are damned right for most of mexico. Not for central mexico though, not if you know where to go (the local market) and what to ask for: a flor de calabaza quesadilla is corn and flower, deep fried in corn oil. Huahuzontle is a thick herb on scrambled eggs with a tomato chile sauce, a taco de hongos will have only cooked assorted wild mushrroms in it... and so on. But that you can only get that kind of diet in DF, Edo Mex, hidalgo, tlaxcala: the central states. Not in oaxaca, for example, where everything is fried in lard and corn oil (and is delicious).

>Live in Australia
>No authentic Mexican food anywhere
The local Mexican restaurant was pretty good, but it was run by a Colombian lady who sold it off to chinks once she'd made a couple million off it.

Fucking hell Mexico, step your shit up and start border-jumping to Australia. We don't even have a Chipotle over here.

>>3751923
Dumping some examples to pay for my guilt.

This beauties are quesadilla de hongos and quesadilla de huitlacoche on blue corn. They are fried in corn oil.

>>3751913
This are tortitas de huauzontle: this is only egg, corn, huahuzontle (gogole for that one, youll see the beautifull eddible herb), deep fried in corn oil. All veggie right there.

>>3751913
This is a flor de calabaza quesadilla. Now bear in mind this quesadillas I show here are not the very very authentic ones in the traditional DF markets that usually are closed (like an empanada), you cannot see inside them unless you break the corn and typically they dont have cheese (yeah, its weird, you want cheese in those, ask for a quesadilla "de queso").

This one is a flor de calabaza quesadilla.

Of course, if youre that far into veggie you wont have egg or cheese, then just have all bran all day and dont ask for "couissine".

>>3751934
Id love to put a mexican restaurant out there... I know it would work. I like surfing, diving snow skiing too.

Hell... wait for me man. Ill give it a shot.

>>3751913
So i hope ive proven that we do have a veggie tradition down here. Its just localized and has weird names in nahuatl, which is the tongue of the old tenochcas (aztecs).

This is a fish taco i bought in Melbourne, Australia.

It was lightly deep fried chunks of white fish, salad, and a lime sourcream style sauce. Pica De Gallo on the side was home made. I asked for the hotter one, which they didn't provide at the tables without my request. Fucking ausfags can't into Mexican.
http://www.urbanspoon.com/r/71/1631993/restaurant/Melbourne/Fonda-Mexican-Richmond

Considering we've come from Taco Bill to this in the space of 5 years, im impressed.

The Taco Craze in Melbourne right now is fucking crazy. We've got our own Taco Truck doing the rounds here too.
http://www.theage.com.au/entertainment/restaurants-and-bars/how-the-taco-won-melbourne-20120716-225l
d.html

>>3751988
bro bro bro have you been to the one in fitzroy on corner of smith street? dat beautiful smell