The regional table / Texas
Breakfast Tacos on Flour Tortillas
The whole dish is decided before any egg is cracked, in a dough of flour, lard and hot water that has to rest half an hour and cook in under a minute.
A breakfast taco is a flour tortilla with something hot in it, and the flour tortilla is a document of the north rather than of the corn country south of it. Bulletin No. 40 of the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Office of Experiment Stations — Arthur Goss, Dietary Studies in New Mexico in 1895, printed in 1897 — sets the two breads side by side and separates them by technique. Corn is boiled with lime, ground on the metate and "patted out in the hands", and "Corn tortillas are never rolled, as is the case with those made from flour"; the wheat dough "is mixed into a dough with water and the cake rolled out from it", from flour that "is not ground in the metate, but in the ordinary flouring mills". The cake is then "baked on a flat piece of iron, supported directly over the fire in the open fireplace, the iron being first greased with lard", and flipped by pressing wet fingers to its top face so it lifts. That is the comal, the rolling pin and the lard, in a federal bulletin, ninety years before anybody wrote the phrase breakfast taco down — and Goss explains the lard too, since the plant foods of the region "contain very little fat" and it has to be bought in. The wheat is northern in the same literature. USDA Bulletin 1074, Classification of American Wheat Varieties, 1922, describes a variety named Sonora with kernels "white, short, soft" that "produces a weak flour, which is mostly used for pastry", and records that it "was brought to the United States from Magdalena Mission, northern Sonora, Mexico, where it has been grown for 150 years"; the 1919 distribution map puts it across the Southwest, Texas included. Weak, low-protein flour is the wrong flour for a loaf and the right one for a tortilla. The Commerce Department's survey Mexican West Coast and Lower California, 1923, gives the rest of the geography: Sonora a wheat state with a flour mill at Hermosillo buying some 225,000 bushels a year before 1910 and mills working on the tercio custom system, while for most of the country further south the corn tortilla ground on the metate is "the universal food".
The dish is younger than any document that would settle it, and the two Texas cities that claim it have quarrelled in public. The earliest dated print of the words breakfast taco I could open is not food writing: Flores v. State, 756 S.W.2d 86, decided by the Fourth Court of Appeals at San Antonio on 10 August 1988, which records in its facts that a man was choked and made to "spit out part of a breakfast taco, which he had been eating". The court explains nothing — by 1988 in San Antonio the phrase needed no gloss. The earliest newspaper printing I could verify is a touring musician's diary in the Athens, Georgia weekly Flagpole of 13 November 1991, written in Austin: "We go to breakfast at this cool little place called Tamale House. We get breakfast tacos for 45 cents each. Athens needs something like this." Two years on, the Houston Home Journal of Perry, Georgia ran a recipe headed Breakfast Tacos calling for twelve taco shells, which is what happens to the thing once it leaves Texas. By 2006 the trade was on the federal record: Susser Holdings of Corpus Christi told the SEC in its registration statement of 12 May 2006 that its Laredo Taco Company kitchens inside its stores prepared "breakfast tacos, lunch tacos, fried and rotisserie chicken and other hot food offerings targeted to the local population in our core markets". The open fight came a decade later, and the Texas Tribune reported it on 10 March 2016: an Eater Austin essay by Matthew Sedacca headed "How Austin Became Home of Crucial Breakfast Taco", a petition with more than 1,700 signatures demanding its writer be run out of the state, and then the mayors — Steve Adler of Austin, Ivy Taylor of San Antonio — signing what they called the I-35 Accords at a downtown hotel and declaring the day Breakfast Taco Day. Taylor brought tacos from Mittman Fine Foods on San Antonio's east side: bacon and egg on corn, chorizo and egg on flour, carne guisada on flour, carne guisada with cheese on flour. Neither city won and nothing I could reach crowns either; the Portal to Texas History, which holds the Texas papers that would likely date the phrase earlier than any of this, now sits behind a proof-of-work wall and was left alone. The quantities below were worked out for this page.
Why this version works
Hot water, not cold. Water near scalding melts the lard right through the dough as you mix, so the fat spreads instead of staying in lumps, and it slackens the gluten before it can organize. The dough comes together tacky and warm in two minutes of kneading. Cold water gives you a dough that has to be worked much longer and still rolls back on itself.
One pan, in the right order. The potatoes go in first because they need the longest and want a dry hot surface to brown on; the chorizo goes in second and renders the fat the potatoes finish in; the eggs go in last, on the lowest heat, and come off underdone because the pan keeps cooking them. Reverse any of that and you are washing three pans and eating rubbery eggs.
A dry skillet, hot and brief. The comal in the 1897 bulletin is a plate of iron over the open fire, greased once. A cast iron skillet at medium-high is the same tool: 30 to 45 seconds a side, brown blisters and pale ground between them. The steam trapped inside is what leaves it pliable, so the tortilla comes off while it is still soft and goes straight into a towel to finish steaming. Cook it until the whole face is tan and you have made a cracker.
Weak flour, and lard rubbed into it. Bulletin 1074 calls Sonora's flour weak and fit for pastry, which is the compliment a tortilla wants: less gluten means a round that rolls thin and stays soft instead of shrinking back at you. Fat does the other half of the job — lard coats the flour and shortens the strands that would otherwise set into a leathery sheet. Plain all-purpose flour is close enough to weak; bread flour is not, and you can feel it fight you on the counter.