Texas excels at treats.
We savor beaver nuggets from Buc-ee’s, little gas station cups of vanilla ice cream from Blue Bell, and countless delicious symbols of collective cultural identity. But despite a distinctly Texan pedigree, I rarely hear the Taco Cabana flour tortilla get the love it deserves.
That’s even more curious, considering the restaurant’s staying power. Felix Stehling opened the first Taco Cabana in 1978 in San Antonio. That small taco stand grew into a popular Tex-Mex fast casual chain, with 143 locations in Texas today.
Visiting Taco Cabana when I was a kid felt like getting the good stuff. I’d lean against the metal railing and watch fresh rounds of dough roll through a heavy-duty tortilla press. When my family’s tray came out, it always carried a half-dozen wrapped warmly in foil.
Now, the tortilla’s history is as wide as its edges are round. Corn tortillas are hallmarks of traditional Mexican cuisine; flour tortillas have roots in northern Mexico and from the Texas border.
The flour tortilla that calls most seductively to my heart is the one that raised me.
If refried beans and gooey yellow cheese are the mortar of the cross-cultural exchange that is Tex-Mex, flour tortillas are the bricks. What makes a “good” or “authentic” version is a discussion for top minds. I am a bottom mind. The flour tortilla that calls most seductively to my heart is the one that raised me.
As a kid, I knew that tortillas weren’t billed as the star of a meal. They were vessels to hold the main event (refried beans for me, usually, or maybe chicken fajitas). So, I felt a rule-breaking thrill opening up that fresh stack of six. It was like when you got pancakes for dinner — a victimless crime against the dusty rules of nutrition, one carbo-loading bite at a time.
Taco Cabana tortillas have personality. Sometimes, the machine delivers one that’s ovoid or roughly shaped like Illinois. They’re neither pliantly thin, like the chewy casing of a burrito, nor blandly dry, like the mass-produced frisbees on grocery store shelves. These flour tortillas are soft, fluffy, and welcoming, like biscuits walloped with a cartoon mallet. A daydreaming mind will seek one big enough to use as a sleeping bag.
Viewed flat, they look like any flour tortilla — mostly off-white and splotched with brown, like your Fort Worth aunt’s tacky cowhide rug. But flip the tortilla on its edge, and if you’re lucky, you’ll find a lopsided bulge. That’s the side you dip in queso first.
“When you think about it, tortillas have the power to create a sensory experience, from the taste to the smell and the touch,” Taco Cabana President Ulyses Camacho tells The Barbed Wire in an email. Tortillas have been on the menu since the beginning, and over years, the restaurant developed its “platinum standard” of what a tortilla needs to be, he says.
The recipe for their bolitas — the round balls of dough that get pressed into tortillas — is proprietary, naturally.
But Camacho divulges that locations follow exacting specifications, from the type of wheat used in the flour to how that flour is ground. It’s all to ensure that the tortillas have the same texture and taste any place, any time.
“Our tortillas are so popular, we get calls from guests out of state asking how they can get some,” Camacho says. Indeed, before I moved to Virginia for my first job out of college, I made the rounds at all my local favorites, so my stomach could say goodbye. Taco Cabana was high on the list.
I rarely tear through a stack like I did as a kid, but sometimes I’ll still order a half-dozen. In the heat of the moment, I find the tortilla with the thickest edge and do unspeakable things to that edible icon. And then again, and again, and again, and again, and again.
Keep your coffin. Bury me in a Taco Cabana tortilla when I die.
Editor’s Note: This is not sponsored content. Eric just really likes Taco Cabana tortillas.
