It's official, there is some truth in advertising. Taco Bell's half pound burritos will indeed fill you up. But it's not a pleasant "I won't have to eat for at least six hours" feeling of satisfaction. No, it's more of "I can't be further than 50 feet from a bathroom for at least 12 hours" type feeling. At least the advertisements are very honest, warning that even a former heavyweight boxing champion's stomach, which is used to being pummeled with uppercuts from the likes of Mike Tyson, couldn't possibly accommodate more than one half pound of what Taco Bell is offering.
I decided to go with the Nacho Crunch variety which is advertised as "A warm flour tortilla loaded with a double portion of seasoned ground beef and filled with warm nacho cheese sauce, juicy tomatoes, reduced fat sour cream and crunchy red tortilla strips." For a burrito that weighs in at half a pound, it sure seems tiny. In fact, I remember getting quite a few bean burritos from the same restaurant which seemed heftier than this one.
I made the terrible mistake of opening the burrito for the sake of the
picture above. Again, it's a burrito, so the inside isn't exactly
supposed to look like a Rembrant painting. Instead, it looks like
something Jean Michelle Basquiat threw together after an all night
bender. The unnaturally bright orange of the "warm nacho cheese" frames
the slop of beef, sour cream, tomatoes, and tiny strips of hard corn
tortillas. I snap the picture and try to put the burrito back together,
but end up with a misshapen mess of oozey cheese and runny beef.
I
sink my teeth into the burrito and I'm confronted with a familiar
sensation. The beef at Taco Bell always seems to have a grittyness to
it, like someone poured a teaspoon of sand into the meat bucket before
spooning it onto the tortilla. This sensation mixed with the weak
crunch of the tortilla strips, which are now soaked with sour cream and
cheese sauce, provides an interesting counterpart to the crunchy
squares of tomato scattered throughout. If you've ever had anything at
Taco Bell, you know exactly what this tastes like. It's beef, cheese,
sour cream, and tomatoes heaped into a tortilla. The cheese sauce
pretty much takes over every other flavor.
After finishing the
burrito, I definitely feel like I could eat more, but my stomach
doesn't agree. Instead, it's in a kind of shut down/haz-mat mode,
proving the advertisements right, just for the wrong reasons.
