Burritophile: Articles

How to Keep Your Burrito Hot on a Road Trip

It's every burritophile's nightmare. You're getting a mid-morning start to a road trip, you've gone to a taqueria right before you left, asked them to double-wrap it in aluminum foil, and kept it in a sunny spot in the car for two hours in the hope that it will stay warm as you rocket through the countryside. Right around lunchtime when your urge to have a burrito is peaking, you take it out, take your first bite, and...luke-cold at best. You've done this ten times, and it's just never hot. You're depressed.

If you're like me, you've probably tried any number of ways to keep that burrito hot. I'll save you some time and share some techniques that didn't work. Please note that these are all bad methods , and they don't work. I am presenting these cautionary notes to save you time and effort:

1) Open the hood of your car, put the burrito on the radiator. Drive. This one seems promising, especially if the radiator boils over, giving your slab a welcome steaming. Sadly, practicalities get in the way. Your burrito can fall off the radiator and be eviscerated by the timing belt; carne asada is tasty but does nothing to help keep your pistons lubed. Also, that steaming? Coolant-flavored guacamole has been known to induce vomiting.

2) When you stop, park in the sun. Put the burrito on the hood of your car and hope that the reflected heat will get it hot. Nice try. This one didn't work in Fresno. I'm not even sure if it would work in Kuwait.

3) Take your cold burrito to the closest McWendyKing and ask to use their oven. Dude, McWendyKings don't have ovens. And don't even talk to me about the deep fryer; that's just gross.

4) Take your cold burrito to Taco Bell and ask to use their steamer. Please. There are no steamers at Taco Bell.

5) Use your cold burrito as a weapon against overly-aggressive drivers. This is a surprisingly satisfying option. If your burrito is well-constructed, though, it might cause broken windows or other serious damage instead of just leaving a satisfying stain. If you're willing go burritoless and have that damage on your conscience, go ahead. But don't say I didn't warn you.

6) Give up, cry in frustration, shake your fist at the heavens, scream like Charlton Heston. While I support anything having to do with the original Planet of the Apes, this doesn't solve your problem.

If you've gone through all that (and even if you haven't), we're happy to present a technique that keeps your burrito off-the-grill toasty for quite a while. It's a surprisingly simple solution that requires five things:

1) A burrito from your favorite local taqueria. If you don't know where to go, here's a handy guide.
2) A brick
3) A cooler (I favor 99 cent styrofoam jobs from 7-11)
4) A small towel
5) An oven

Preheat your oven to 300 degrees. Put the brick in the oven and heat for thirty minutes. When you get back with your burrito, wet the dishtowel and wring it out. It should be damp but not dripping.

Take the brick out of the oven (use a hot mitt or potholder) and wrap it in the damp towel. Put the toweled brick in the bottom of the cooler, then add the burrito. Cap the cooler with the cooler top, take it out to your car, and drive off.

This simple solution will keep your burrito warm and comfortable for at least two hours. If you do give this a shot and it works for a longer time, please write in and tell us about it. Or send pictures. Of yourself and the burrito, please...keep the dirty stuff to yourself.

Kudos to my dad, who came up with this trick back in 2002, allowing a poor New York burritophile to eat a hot one from Los Charros while on the way from Oakland to Bear Valley. Thanks, dad!

A Quick History of Guacamole

The Aztecs invented it.

Seriously, that's it. When the Spaniards encountered the Aztec empire back in the 1500s, the locals were making a sauce called ahuaca-mulli, which means "avocado-mixture." The dish was prepared by mashing avocados, sometimes with tomatoes and onions. Sound familiar? Add a few hot peppers and a touch of cilantro, and you've got modern guac.

As the Spanish tended to do with all good ideas from the New World, they stole the best ideas from the natives and brought what they could back to Spain. Unfortunately for our friends in Europe, avocados don't grow particularly well in the Old World, making fresh guac the province of the Americas for the next several hundred years. Sailors and travelers ate various forms of the stuff, notably the English who made avocado paste, called it "midshipman's butter," and spread it on their hardtack.

The word "avocado" descends linguistically from the ancient Nahuatl (a dialect of ancient Aztec) word ahuacatl, meaning "testicles." Some language experts think that the conquistadors combined the Nahuatl with the Spanish "abogado" (lawyer) to make the present word for our favorite green fruit. So, when you're eating guac, you're chowing on mashed lawyer balls.

Most American avocados come from California, where there over 6,000 avocado groves dot the southern part of the state. Most of those avocados are of the Hass variety (Haas is a common misspelling); Florida avocados are larger, more fibrous, and taste worse, like everything from Florida. Outside the US, avocados are grown in Mexico, Peru, Chile, Argentina, Spain, Israeal, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand. Current US policy essentially forbids the importation of avocados from Mexico, driving up domestic prices and making it nearly impossible to get a decent avocado outside of California for less than two bucks.

Modern guacamole comes in many forms. In some taquerias, it's large chunks of barely-cut avocado, in others it's a paste with a lively mixture of tomatoes, onions, and cilantro. And in some unfortunate cases, it's a soupy liquid with equal parts avocado, water, and sour cream. At any rate, it's very difficult to improve on the recipe that the Aztecs pioneered hundreds of years ago.The recipe below would probably bring a smile to Montezuma himself.

Guacamole Recipe

This is the recipe I use, cribbed from God knows where. Hope you like it.

Two Hass avocados. None of that Florida junk.
A tomato (vine-ripened, please. No supermarket gas-inspired flavorless crud.)
Half of a small onion
Some cilantro
A serrano pepper
Salt
Pepper
Lime juice

Dice the tomato and the onion. Mash the avocado, and squeeze some lime juice on it (this prevents it from turning brown). Mix it together; if the ratio of avocado to onion/tomato looks off, add more of whatever you like. Dice the pepper and add enough to give it just a touch of heat. Salt, pepper, and cilantro to taste. Put it on anything.

Sources / Further Reading

The California Avocado Commission

The Gourmet Sleuth's Guacamole page

Wikipedia

America's First Cuisines by Sophie D. Coe.

The Ten Commandments, with Selected Annotations

Below you will find the Ten Statements of the Burritophiles, inscribed on aluminum foil and recently unearthed from a grease trap in San Jose, California. Early reaction to the Statements has run the gamut from ridicule to derision, although some have professed profound apathy. For the rest of us, we have included a distillation of the outpouring of critical thought.

"I am the Burrito your God who brought you out of the land of Taco Bell..."
"You shall have no other burritos besides Me...Do not make a sculpted image or any likeness of what is in the foil above..."
"You shalt not eat falsely by the name of the Burrito..."
"Remember the salsa day and keep it holy"
"Honor your father and your mother..."
"You shall not murder"
"You shall not commit burritory"
"You shall not steal"
"You shall not bear false burritos against your neighbor"
"You shall not covet your neighbor's burrito..."

Critical interpretation:

Obvious, although some scholars translate the original Aramaic as "Green Burrito" or "Del Taco."
A subject of debate, as who would want to make a sculpture of a burrito?
"Eating falsely" most probably refers to those who encase Thai chicken or other such substance in a wrapper and falsely present it as a burrito.
Salsa Day, in ancient times, was the most sacred of days during the Burritoric Year. Traditional activities included sleeping until 11:30, putting on a baseball cap, and heading out for a burrito.
"Father" obviously refers to the burro, namesake of the burrito. "Mother" could be the Virgin Mary, or the Glenn Danzig song. Debate rages. More conflict arises when we consider the apocryphal Van Winkle Codex, which replaces "Honor" with "Word to." There is a Master's thesis here somewhere.
This continues to confuse academics, as violence has never been a part of Burrito Culture. The definitive interpretation has yet to be discovered.
Burritory: the practice of ordering for yourself and your friend, deciding while he's in the bathroom that his sounds better, taking a big bite out of his and declaring when he gets back, "Oh, dude, they switched our burritos! I guess I'll just take this one..."
This applies equally to both sides of the counter: Consumers should pay for the burritos they order, while purveyors should give full value and not stuff their burritos with lettuce.
If your roommate asks you to grab him something to eat while you're out, don't bring back a Chalupa. That's just mean.
Be satisfied with what you have, even if your buddy got his wet, with extra guac.

The Burritophiles feel that these 10 instructions give a clear, simple guide for leading an orderly and moral life. Consequently, we are currently lobbying to have these Commandments posted outside every taqueria. Although there are those who say this violates the separation of Church and State, we contend that there is no possible way for such a tasty concoction to have come about by pure chance...but ID and burritos is a topic for another day.

If your spouse-to-be doesn't like burritos, what do you do?

This is a question that comes to us at Burritophile from time to time. Boy meets girl, boy likes girl, boy and girl get together, they have months and months of bliss, he buys a big diamond, they get engaged, they plan a wedding. In the planning stages of the wedding, they figure out the tux, they figure out the flowers, they start working on the catering.

He: "So, who should we have food from?"
She: "I was thinking about..."
He: "That crepe place?"
She (shocked): "Um...I was thinking about burritos. Think about it -- they could bring in heaping plates of carne asada, piles of salsa, guacamole. Everyone could make their own burritos! It'd be cheap, incredibly tasty, fun, and everyone would remember it!"
He (long pause). "Um...I don't really like burritos. Or any Mexican food, for that matter."

What To Do

The first rule is, don't immediately cancel the wedding. Although that's obviously going to be your first instinct, try to fight it. There are many possible sources for your loved one's burritophobia, and it may not be the personality flaw that it appears to be on the surface. Try to get to the root of the problem. Ask questions and remember to use lots of "I" statements. Here are some examples to get you started.

"I wonder if you've never had a good burrito. What kind of burritos have you had?"
"I think that your response means that you may have eaten lots of Taco Bell. Why didn't you tell me about this problem, so we could work on it together?
"I feel bad when you talk about burritos in that way. Why do you insist on hurting me?"
"I think that anyone who doesn't like burritos is an idiot. Why did you lie to me about having a college degree?"
"I am wondering why I am sitting here, given that you do not like to eat burritos. Can you give me four good reasons?"
"I am thinking that you are perhaps not the person I'd like to spend my life with. The only way we can change this is by going to get a burrito right now. Where would you like to go?"

Notice how the conversation is redirected to exactly where you'd like it to be. Any conversation that ends with both parties getting a burrito is a good one.

Of course, if your spouse answers the final question with "I don't want a burrito," you have a serious problem, one that may require treatment. Unfortunately, burritophobia is not a specialty that psychiatry school addresses as part of the standard curriculum, and it is very unlikely that your medical insurance will cover treatment for your loved one's malady. Our crack lobbying team is working around the clock on K Street to try to attack this obvious need through federal legislation or constitutional amendment, but that process can take quite a while. Your marriage needs saving now.

Turn that frown upside down! You're in luck! We here at Burritophile have made an extensive study of 19th-century texts devoted to the treatment of odd phobias, and by putting our knowledge of these methods together with our long experience in eating burritos, we've devised a treatment method that we know will have your honey-bunny carping for carne asada, agitating for al pastor, and chomping at the bit for one bite of chile verde!

Important: follow this treatment path exactly. Do not attempt to use substitute ingredients or change the order of operations in any way. If you screw this up, your lovebird could end up with a pathological love of burros, and we have a feeling that you really don't need an extra equine in your marital bed.

Remove your sweetie from his surroundings. Give him a concentrated dose of Phenobarbital with his boring-ass dinner, then wrap him in a straightjacket while he sleeps.
Pile him into a station wagon. If you do not own a station wagon, rent one. SUVs, Honda Elements, and Toyota Scions are not station wagons. No substitutions allowed.
Drive him to one of the sleazy motels that line El Camino Real in Mountain View, California.
Hook him up to a catheter. If you don't know how to insert a urinary catheter, look here. Urinary catheters also come with a handy instruction manual.
Go to Target and purchase a large supply of generic diapers.
Swaddle him.
From here on out, it should be obvious. Your loved one is not allowed to eat anything for seven days. Don't worry about him or her dying, as humans can survive for several weeks without food, especially if they aren't doing anything at all. You get the fun part -- you get to go out of the room twice a day and get burritos from any one of the fine taquerias that dot the area, and eat them. Do not bring them back to the motel room; only come back after you've eaten, informing your spouse of the wonderful meal you have just had.
After seven days, bring home a hot burrito and put it on your loved one's chest. Do not feed him the burrito yet; let him stare at the cylindrical God for several hours, driving him crazy with hunger and lust.
Bring home another burrito (we recommend a super al pastor from Taqueria La Bamba), loosen the arms of his straight jacket, and watch him go to town!

Watch him eat in a frenzy! Obviously, he now loves burritos!

Of course, if this doesn't work, go ahead and call off the wedding.

Two and a half Weeks of Steaks

Two and a half weeks of steaks every day. For most Americans, that sounds like heaven, the culinary equivalent of a week of hot-tub makeout sessions with Jessica Alba. For us, it was getting a little bit old. Don't get me wrong; Brazilian gaucho-style steak dinners (and lunches, and one very memorable breakfast) are amazing. The waiters bring perfectly done flanks, tenderloins, beef riblets and sirloins to your table and slice 'em off the skewer they were cooked on. You eat for an hour for under $10.

But, even that gets old. We were on our third day in Lencois, a small town five hours by night bus from Salvador, the capital of the northeastern state of Bahia. Lencois was a mountain oasis from the lowland heat, a smattering of small buildings, smack in the middle of a range of Arizona-class buttes.

We weren't planning on being there for more than a day. Terry is obsessive-compulsive about many things, but on the subject of breakfast he's an absolute nutjob. Our Lonely Planet for Brazil declared that Lencois was the best place in Brazil for a good breakfast, and that the hotels in town competed with each other for the honor of serving the best. When he
read that and I saw that the place was in the mountains, it was a foregone conclusion that we'd stop by.

Every morning, we'd get up and pack our bags with the intention of having breakfast, going out for the day, then catching a night bus back to Salvador. And every morning we'd have breakfast, look out at the river flowing over the rocks, and go to the owner of the Pousada Canto des Aguas and ask to stay just one more night. She'd laugh, we'd get our bags from storage,
and we'd be there for another day and one more steak dinner outside on the town square.

Our fourth night in town would be our last; the hotel owner had kept our bags in storage for the day, and we'd showered in the little room next to the pool instead of our own spot. Our flight out was in two days, and we wanted to spend one more night in the city before taking the flight back to Chicago.

We walked out into the main plaza, a cobblestoned square on the other side of the river from our hotel. The place was pleasantly crowded; everyone in town hung out there before dinner time, and the foreign and Brazilian tourists wandering round gave the place a cosmopolitan vibe.

"I'm not feeling it here," I said. "Let's walk around a bit."

"Cool," said Terry.

The side streets didn't present much in the way of distraction; each one wound away from the main square for about a hundred yards, then either dead-ended into the hillside or just petered out into the fields. We walked up and down three, past little pousadas and cafes dotted with people, all serving variants on the steak and potatoes we'd been living on since coming to the country.

A small lane led off one of the streets; it was missing the cobblestones that characterized most of the town. Muddy ruts led up either side of the alley. On the right side, a sign was visible in the faint light cast from the house across the way.

Tacos y Burritos

No way. Terry and I looked at each other, then at the sign, then back at each other, like in a movie, but for real.

"Dude," I said. "We have to go in."

Terry nodded.

We walked into a small hallway. Doors led to what looked like bedrooms, and a cramped stairway was at the end. A door on the right led outside, where a small kitchen overlooked a quiet patio, where a couple was munching on what looked like chips and salsa by candlelight.

"Buenos tardes," said a smiling woman with an apron as we walked in. "Please, sit."

I grinned. We sat. She handed us menus. Tacos, burritos, guacamole, tostadas...everything you'd expect from a back-home taqueria.

The woman brought us bowls of homemade chips and fiery red salsa as we looked at our menus. We both bought burritos; carnitas and pollo asado, respectively.

Bliss. Tortillas, black beans, fresh guac, juicy pico de gallo...it was all there. The burritos weren't particularly big or wrapped in aluminum foil, and the cheese was more cheddar than the traditional Monterey Jack, but it didn't matter to us.

"Good," I said.

"Mmphh," said Terry.

"You like it?" said the man half of the couple sitting on the other side of the patio.

"Hell, yes," I said. "We've been eating nothing but Brazilian for weeks. This is heaven."

He smiled, turning up the ends of his mustache.

"Yeah." His accent was San Diego by way of Cardiff. "We've been coming to Lencois for five years, and we always eat here. It's the only real Mexican food in Bahia. The owner is from small town in Baja; she always tells us that the food isn't quite like you can get at home. "

"Yeah," said Terry. "The avocados aren't quite right."

The man shrugged. "They aren't really native to here, so she grows her own. We're lucky to get any at all."

"Cheers to that," I said, raising my icy mug of chopp.

I've had better burritos in my life, I suppose; burritos that were more filling, with bigger, tastier avocados and plumper beans. Who cares? I'd spent that day floating in an underground lake miles from anywhere, and I spent that evening having one of the best burrito experiences this burritophile has had anywhere.

Chipotle

I was prepared to hate Chipotle's burritos. It wouldn't take that much work: I already hated their slogans, their idiotic pun-filled catch-phrases, their trumpeting of how damned big their burritos are. When I first moved to Chicago, I worked downtown every now and then at an office that was across from the Loop's first branch, and I refused to try it, put off by their McDonald's ownership, obnoxious ads, and faux urban trip-hop decor. I openly rooted for them to fail on micro and macro levels. I wanted their burritos to suck and the entire venture to go the way of the Arch Deluxe.

I was stuck for lunch one day, so I bit the bullet and went in; when in a bind, a burritophile will always go for a burrito, come what may.

Chipotle doesn't fail. They're trying to do everything right; all of their meat is now antibiotic-free, and their carnitas would be a respectable entry in any family taqueria's menu. The salsas are good (although I really don't understand the medium-hot corn, which is something I've never seen and don't like much), the rice ain't bad, the barbacoa is well-spiced and the carnitas are crispy on the outside, tender inside. The chicken and steak are boring, but so is most pollo and asada. They do a terrible job of integrating their ingredients, and the tortillas are flavorless and a bit rubbery, but I've had those problems in locally-owned places before.

It's so hard to like them. They're Bennigan's and Applebee's and KFC and Burger King and Starbucks and Panera Bread and every other upscale or downscale place that's working to iron out the wrinkles in the fabric of America and turn us all into the suburbs of Columbus, Ohio. One Chipotle looks exactly like another, down to the layout of the scoop trays. They're carpet-bombing urban centers, much like Starbucks did in the late 1990s. People with better choices are voting them the best burrito in town, like in Sacramento, where people would rather eat Chipotle than pay half the price for a wet one from El Portal.

But they're the only place to get a decent burrito in downtown Chicago or the entire island of Manhattan. Fillings are fresh and tasty. Their founder seems like a pretty cool guy. This is a case where flavor outweighs politics.

Most cities don't have access to decent burritos. If you're stuck in a city (say, Columbus) without a decent hole-in-the-wall taqueria and you've got the urge for a foil wrapped cylindrical fat one, get thee to a Chipotle and don't feel guilty about enjoying yourself. On the other hand, if you're in San Francisco, get your butt over to the Mission and chow down for half the price.

Things That Are Not Burritos

Wraps

Let's be very clear here: satay chicken, lemongrass, cucumber, and peanut sauce can be a wonderful combination, but under no circumstances do they make up a burrito. They become even less like a burrito when you stuff 'em into a spinach/artichoke pita square. Wraps are an insidious attempt to dilute the nature of a burrito, to slowly turn the Cylindrical God into yet another fusion dish that takes an entire paragraph to describe. Which sounds better:

1) Seaweed, sprouts, organic greens, and twice-marinated Cajun-style seitan, wrapped in an all-natural, whole-grain vegan lavash. The lavash is uncooked, instead, we mix it, roll it, and dry it in the sun on top of six specially selected obsidian stones from Mana Loa national park in Hawaii.

or

2) Super burrito, carnitas, with avocado, cheese, and hot salsa.

?

Remember that scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark where the Nazis open up the Ark of the Covenant and the wrath of God spews out in a torrent and melts everyone's face? That's the level of vengeance that I'd like to visit upon people who ask me if I want a burrito, and then take me to a place that serves wraps.

Wraps and their ilk are foods that are guilty of a cardinal sin: attempting to improve upon a burrito. You cannot improve upon the form and function of a burrito, because the burrito is the most perfect food in the world. A burrito is everything you want, stuffed in a convenient package, then wrapped in cheap, convenient insulating material. By attempting to improve upon the burrito, putting burrito ingredients in something other than a tortilla, or (the deadliest of sins) calling something a burrito that absolutely is not a burrito, you're slapping God in the face with a glove, kicking Him in the nuts, and telling the Almighty that his mother wears army boots.

Burrito Bowls

Alternate spelling: Burrito Bol (seen at Chipotle). Huh? Does Manute have anything to do with Mexican food? Chipotle started this despicable trend, and we've seen the concept spread to otherwise-normal taquerias here in San Francisco. A Bowl (we won't dignify it by using burrito as an adjective. The only proper uses of the word burrito are as a noun and a verb.) is made by taking the ingredients you'd usually have in a burrito and putting them in a bowl; apparently this is South Beach or Atkins or Zone or some other low-carb ridiculousness. Whatever it is, it ain't no burrito. A real burrito requires no fork.

McDonald's Breakfast Burritos

I ate one of these once on the way up to Tahoe. One and a half powdered eggs and artificial sausage, wrapped up in a tortilla that began its life on the shelf of an Alabama Wal-Mart as a quarter of a Brawny paper towel. That sucker went right through me faster than a suspect bite of al pastor, without any of the tasty positives.

Schwarma

In 2004 the SF Weekly had the chicken or lamb schwarma from Truly Mediterranean as their Best Burrito. Please. I like Middle Eastern food as much as the next guy, but schwarma is not a burrito. Lavash is not a tortilla, tatzhiki sauce is not salsa, cucumbers are not avocados, and there is no such thing as schwarma in Mexican food. Goat, yes. Cabeza, yes. Tongue and tripe are fine. Schwarma, no. None of us at Burritophile have read the Weekly since the appearance of this journalistic abomination. If they don't know a non-burrito when they see one, how can we trust their reporting about less important issues, like city council issues and police corruption?

Crepes

I've only seen this happen once. Crepes are effete food, the domain of low-carb obsessed yuppies and wannabe foodies. Crepes are almost always breakfast. Crepes can contain broccoli, feta cheese, chicken apple sausage, potatoes, and any number of other things that no respectable burrito would ever be caught dead containing.

Taco Bell's Grilled Chicken Stuffed Enchilada Burrito

An enchilada and a burrito are two different things, and you can no more turn "enchilada" into an adjective than you can "burrito."

Anything from Taco Bell

If you need an explanation for this, go work for the Weekly.

Burritophile: Articles

How to Keep Your Burrito Hot on a Road Trip

A Quick History of Guacamole

Guacamole Recipe

Sources / Further Reading

The Ten Commandments, with Selected Annotations

If your spouse-to-be doesn't like burritos, what do you do?

What To Do

Two and a half Weeks of Steaks

Chipotle

Things That Are Not Burritos

Wraps

Burrito Bowls

McDonald's Breakfast Burritos

Schwarma

Crepes

Taco Bell's Grilled Chicken Stuffed Enchilada Burrito

Anything from Taco Bell

Places To Go If You Want Something That's Probably Not A Burrito

360° Gourmet Burritos

Great Wraps

New York Burrito Gourmet Wraps

Rio Wraps

Wawa

World Wrapps

WrapZone