Taco Bell Volcano Tacos - technically correct
Taco Bell was my second exposure to "Mexican" food. My first exposure to "Mexican" food was Taco Johns. I was a kid in Wyoming, so I really believed I liked Mexican food when I liked Taco Johns (to tell the truth, I can remember being a little nervous about trying Taco Bell when I first saw it, in Billings, MT).
Anywho, years pass, blah blah blah and now I am a jaded guy traveling the country on his stomach. Taco Bell is fake food, but, I still crave it. But, like so many things, that craving doesn't lead to action unless there is additional stimulus. In this case, the stimulus was the Volcano Taco. How could I resist those charming commercials with the dude trying to pretend he isn't literally smoking from his ears from stealing his friends taco? Priceless.
So, what about this Volcano Taco? Is it good? Is it spicy?
First, take a look at these tantalizing pictures, showing the texture and layers of flavor.
The Volcano Taco is both the stereotypical fake spicy food and real spicy food. It has a red shell (like some beetles, it signals DANGER!), but the shell is not spicy (like a ladybug, if you want to continue with the bug analogy). Thus, it is fake spicy. However, it is actually spicy. That creamy sauce is their volcano sauce. It is actually spicy. I also like to make it even more spicy by adding their "fire" sauce. Unfortunately, and this is a serious error by the guys who named their spices, the drive through girl (who was friendly in a very frank and surprising way) thought I ordered mild. This was an error by the guys who named the sauces, because both "mild" and "fire" have a long "i" sound, which when sent through the horrible drive through audio system sound the same. The taco is good, as far as drive through fake tacos go. But it isn't as good as a real taco. In this picture, you can see the white powdery stuff that you find on cheese that has been grated at a factory, not by a person in your town. When I worked at a Mexican restaurant the first time, I had to grate cheese by hand. It tasted better than this, except when I grated my fingertips, in which case the cheese got bloody and didn't taste as good. I can still hear Santos, my boss, yelling "Kade! Don't bleed on the cheese" in his classic Mexican accent. Ahhh, memories.
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