3.8 KiB
+++ categories = ["food"] tags = ["recipe", "meal-prep", "reverse-engineer", "taco-bell"] date = 2024-04-27T05:12:13Z description = "A scalable method for batch-making freezer burritos with precisely portioned tortillas, beans, beef, rice, and cheese." draft = false slug = "burrito" title = "🌯 Burritos in Bulk" author = "nicholas" +++
About this post
This is shallow dive into the mass production of homemade burritos. This recipe is designed to achieve a pareto-optimal mix of taste, simplicity, and cost-efficiency. The ingredients are few, the measurements exact and scalable.
Not Reinventing the Wheel
I used Taco Bell's ingredient labels and nutrition information to derive my own bean, rice, and beef recipe, mostly because it is fun to reverse-engineer foods that taste good. Taco Bell's success and veritable midwestern monopoly on Mexican-style fast-food is evidence enough of them having found their own kind of optimum. Yes, they have far more considerations than I do – supply chains / logistics, storage, shelf life, labor efficiency, ingredient availability, and profitability – so I may have reverse-engineered this burrito that exists in its particular form for reasons beyond my comprehension or utility, and in a manner much like a cargo-cult, but I have nothing better to aim at as I love their burritos.
Burrito Components - The Holy Quintet
Just five entities compose the divine essence of the burrito.
Tortilla
I use a supermarket ~10" burrito-style flour tortilla. At this time I have no desire to even attempt making 35 burrito tortillas.
UPDATE: I made some excellent very large Chipotle-like burritos and they are very good.
Beans
The beans that result of the recipe are semi-solid, or, the consistency of something like a firm yogurt when at refrigeration temperatures. I tried two methods of applying the beans to the burrito. I tried to extrude the beans out of a pastry bag with a roughly 0.5" nozzle. This worked alright, but refilling the bag was a bigger mess than I was attempting to avoid by scooping, which brings me to the second method. I had a gigantic bowl of beans and scooped them onto the burrito. They are pinto beans with some salt, lard, and some seasonings.
Beef
I use the cheapest ground beef I can find, on the as-yet unproven but theoretically trivially easy to prove assumption that it produces the most lean meat per unit cost. In the mean time I reserve the belief that it was worth it in any case for the tallow I collect, a belief which I will deploy as a sort of coping mechanism if I find out I have gotten unlucky with my unusually lazy reasoning. It is just for fun.
UPDATE: I now have more beef fat and money saved than I know what to do with.
Rice
I use a rice cooker to cook long-grain white rice. I am not sure of the variance in recommended ratios of rice and water between rice cooker models, but after the cooking process is finished, all should result in cooked rice with similar ratios. Thus, substituting my own water weight measurement for any other should result in similar rice to this. This is something I have not put much thought into – ultimately almost certainly unimportant.
Cheese
I take a block of sharp cheddar cheese, divide it into sticks that can fit into the port on my food processor, and shred it into heaps and mounds. There is no recipe!
Assembly
Each ~10" tortilla can accommodate at most ~8 oz. of filling. I generally aim to fill each with the following amounts:
| Ingredient | Weight (oz.) |
|---|---|
| beans | 2.25 |
| beef | 2.25 |
| rice | 2.25 |
| cheese | 1.0 |
Final Product
{{< image src="images/burritos.jpg" caption="Burrito Stack, do not bother counting, there are more out of frame" >}}
Reheat from frozen takes ~45" @ 450 F convection. Wrapped tightly in aluminum foil