Dude. Awesome. Meat is not murder when it’s edible art like this. I have had over a dozen varieties of tacos al pastor and each blend of meat has been unique – even the same Taco Inn restaurant in Mexico City had a different flavor in the meat from day to day… always good, but always a subtle difference.
My guess is because it’s all hand-made. There’s no huge factory pumping out some name-brand carne al pastor. Instead, there’s so many cottages producing the stuff as a cottage industry that it really is being mass-produced, just without any central direction or planning. No government, no corporation… just someone who knows how to put awesome on a vertical spit and slap it between a corn tortilla with onions and cilantro when it’s ready.
I really don’t think anyone can compete with the hundreds of thousands of carne al pastor producers. Uniformity brings blandness, and carne al pastor is never, ever bland. And the tacos themselves are just a buck – or ten pesos in Mexico, which is still pretty much a buck. Forget the dollar menu at a burger joint: if you hit the taqueria, you’ll get something way more amazing than a mass-produced edible hockey puck. If you’re lucky like me and live within close range of several taquerias, the lunchtime dilemma is over which flavors to savor, not which burger to murder.
Tacos al pastor… because of them, I will seriously contemplate any offer made to move to Mexico.
my favorite. There is a little Mexican meat market down the road that sells perfectly marinated pork for Tacos al Pastor.
throw in a few pineapple chunks after the meat starts to get a little crispy…then a little bit of onion..then toss the meat = into a warm tortilla with some queso fresco, cilantro, tomatillo salsa and a squeeze of lime?
shooooooo. That’s a taco!
Thank goodness it’s lunch time here. Otherwise, I think I would go out of my mind waiting for it!
I can’t say anything about the tacos in Mexico since I haven’t been there in almost a decade, but I can tell you about the ones in the US. If you’ve ever come in contact with Hispanic businesses you’ll notice a similarity to the American run businesses, the need to turn a popular food into a mass produced commodity. If you say that every El Pastor taco you’ve come across is a piece of heaven you have obviously never tried the tacos from your local La Michoacana, Fiesta, or other large Hispanic corporation. No matter how good a food you may come across you can always count on some large corporation to turn it into a mass produced ball of slime. It’s just the way business works; the larger the scale of production, the cheaper it is to make it which results in a larger profit, the goal of every sane-minded company.
I didn’t know about them, since I’ve just been getting the finished products from the store vendors. So how does the price of the bland pre-fab stuff compare to the real thing?
where do you get these here?! they look yummmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmy:)
You can get some good ones at Parri Pollo at Walnut and Plano. Plate of five for $6. Share with a friend or two, it’s a lot of chow. Once you’ve mastered those, you can graduate to for-reals taquerias.
They cost about the same, a dollar per taco.