Why Lettuce Should Be on the Outside of Your Taco
Cutting corners really feels good when it actually works. I know that sometimes laziness means you’ll have to work harder in the end, but every time I come across a new cooking hack, I start to trust my laziness instincts even more. In the case of hard tacos, an extra two minutes to chop the lettuce would have been two minutes extra before shoving the taco in my face. Because of this refusal to do anything “right,” I found my favorite hard taco trick: using lettuce leaves as an edible base for the crispy taco shells.
Lettuce will hold your crumbling shell together
I don’t usually eat hard tacos. I love the flavor of corn and love the crunchy contrasting texture, but I hate how they break apart as soon as you look at them. As a Taco Bell fan, I’ve always appreciated the Double Decker Taco Supreme, which uses a soft flour tortilla wrapped around the outside of a hard taco (with refried beans acting as a reliable glue). When you take a bite, the crispy shell naturally breaks, but the outer soft layer of the tortilla holds it in place.
While I didn’t intend for this outcome, you can essentially use lettuce to do the same thing as a flour tortilla. Please note: I am in no way suggesting that you replace the crispy taco shell with lettuce. This is something you can do if you want, but I fully believe that carbs are an integral part of the taco.
What you need for the perfect taco night:
As I mentioned, due to my persistent laziness, I didn’t want to cut up the salad on last night’s taco. Instead, I took a leaf of iceberg lettuce and wrapped it around the outside of the shell. I filled the taco as usual and took a bite. I’m usually resigned to letting the hard taco shell fly all over my plate, but the salad acted as a prop. In fact, when the lettuce was on the outside, there was more room in the center of the shell for more seasoned meat, cheese, and hot sauce.
Make no mistake, the shell will still break right down the spine (as you can see in the picture of my breakfast taco), but the salad reduces the damage and keeps the broken pieces in one place. There’s no need to chop the vegetables, plus you’ll have more room for toppings and an overall better taco-eating experience.
You can use any type of lettuce as long as it is large enough to wrap around the bottom. I like iceberg because it’s functionally a pliable blanket of crunchy water and it’s cheap, but a small piece of romaine, redleaf or Boston bibb works just fine. Even kale will work if you like, but it needs to be the tender part of the leaf. If you, like me, have given up on crunchy tacos because of their crumbly texture, consider this a sign that they should be back on the menu.