The exact fillings can be adjusted to your tastes. Personally if I'm going with crunch corn taco shells, I go with beef, hot sauce, tomato, lettuce, and cheese, while if I'm going with soft taco tortillas I go with beef, hot sauce, tomato, black beans, rice, and cheese. Others add things like sour cream, corn kernels, guacamole, salsa, diced onions, and so on. Choose the ingredients you like best on that front, but stay a bit closer on the seasoned beef recipe ;)
- Taco "shells" (either crunchy corn or soft flour tortillas)
- Seasoned ground beef (see below)
- Louisiana Hot Sauce (ideally the one that says "The Original Louisiana Hot Sauce" on the bottle as that is one of the very few on the market with no preservatives added, it's also a bit stronger in flavor and heat than Crystal/Texas Pete/etc and less vinegary than Tabasco)
- Aged white cheddar (shredded by hand; pre-shredded cheese is literally mixed with wood pulp, don't buy it)
- Tomatoes, diced (optional)
- Lettuce, loosely shredded (optional)
- Black beans, drained and maybe re-soaked and drained again (optional)
- White rice (optional)
- Sour Cream (optional)
- Canned corn (optional)
- Guacamole (optional)
- Salsa (optional)
- Diced Onion (optional)
- Heat the taco shells/tortillas and reheat the ground beef if necessary.
- Put all of the individual ingredients in the center of the table and fill the taco shells/tortillas with whichever ingredients you enjoy.
- Eat until full!
This recipe has been changed a bit over time to be easy to cook at the expense of taking a little bit longer to cook. Everything is measured for 2lbs of ground beef so there are leftovers (but not so much leftovers that you get sick of it). You'll need just a stove top, a wooden ladle, and a large pot that ideally can hold 10 quarts or more.
- 2lbs of lean ground beef (96% lean or higher, ideally)
- 1/2 cup of ground chili pepper (not chili powder, that's pre-mixed with other spices already)
- 1/4 cup of ground cayenne pepper
- 1/4 cup of garlic powder
- 1/4 cup of onion powder
- 1/4 cup of lemon pepper
- 1/4 cup of whole oregano
- 1 Tbps of salt
- A lot of water!
- Take the ground beef and pinch small, fingernail-sized pieces off and toss loosely into the pot. This will cover a few layers deep, but the point is to make sure that there aren't massive clumps of ground beef in there. This takes the most amount of your actual time.
- Add water to the pot (yes, before the meat is cooked) and make sure you have ~50% more water than beef in there, so the ground beef should start floating.
- Add all of the spices into the water and stir the whole mixture so it's evenly distributed (and you're sure there's no meat stuck to the bottom from when you first started tossing bits in there).
- Turn the stove on to maximum and bring the water to a boil. While it's coming up to a boil you need to stir every so often.
- Once it's at a roiling boil, leave it alone. It will now cook.
- Check roughly once every 15 minutes on the progress, stirring a bit to use the water to grab and re-mix in any seasoning stuck to the inner sides of the pot.
- When the water is almost gone and the meat no longer moves while cooking, you need to watch it and stir manually to fully evaporate the water.
- Once it starts to sizzle instead of boil (there is a volume change; the pot literally gets a lot louder with a "spikier" sound) you can turn it off.
- Optional: if you prefer middle eastern style ground beefs (like how the Halal Guys does it) let the bottom burn a bit, then stir it a bit and let it burn again, until the brown/black ratio that you see in the mixture is to your liking (eg 70% brown, 30% black is pretty good).