Who invented tacos?
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This is But Why, a podcast for curious kids from Vermont Public. I'm Jane Lindholm. On this show, we take questions from curious kids all over the world just like you, and we find answers. I know I'm supposed to be focused on work right now, but it's lunchtime when I'm making this episode, and I'm feeling really hungry. What am I feeling hungry for, you might wonder? Why, thanks for asking. I'm feeling hungry for tacos.

Good thing that in this episode, we're headed to a taqueria. A taqueria is a restaurant or food stand that makes and sells tacos. Tacos originated in Mexico, but they're popular all over the world. And a lot of you have sent us questions about this popular and ever-evolving food.

So to learn more and get some answers to your preguntas deliciosas, I went to Austin, Texas to talk with two people who know a lot about tacos. My name is Edgar Rico. I am the chef and co-owner here at Nixta Taqueria in Austin, Texas.

Hey y'all, I am Sarah Martin Biggie. I am the other half of Nixa Taqueria and I do all of our operations. Alright, let's talk tacos. We have a lot of taco questions from kids. My name is Eleni and I am seven years old and I live in Lakewood, Ohio. Who first made tacos? My name is Ben. I am six years old.

I live in Ithaca, New York, who invented tacos. My name is Audrey. I'm nine years old. I live in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who first made tacos. Where did tacos come from? This is a very hotly debated topic, actually. But from what researchers do say, there's kind of two ways that tacos kind of were invented. I mean, one of them definitely for sure is

was that the native people, the Mesoamericans that were living in Mexico, so the Aztecs, Mayans that were living there, they used to eat a lot of, they weren't necessarily maybe called a taco, but they were eating a round disc made of corn tortilla, essentially. A tortilla is an essential part of a taco. Now, we don't know exactly when people started eating tacos, but Edgar says the essence of a taco, that corn tortilla,

That corn tortilla filled with some kind of meat or vegetable has long been a staple in Mesoamerica. That's a historical region that encompassed parts of Mexico and Central America.

The Aztec people were eating corn tortillas, ground up corn that's been turned into a dough and then flattened out for thousands of years. And Edgar points out that many people think the word taco comes from... The native language called Nahuatl, which is spoken by Aztec people. But another idea is that tacos as we know them today are more recently tied to the late 1800s. There was a lot of mining that was happening in Mexico and

And a lot of the miners who would work would get these corn-filled tortillas and they would fill them with a little guiso, so to speak, or like a little braised meat is what we call a guiso in Spanish. They would take the couple of these with them as a little lunch

and they would go work the mines. And, you know, a taco is a nice kind of package in a meal. It's all wrapped up, and you can take it with you, and it's transportable. And these guys would eat these throughout the day. You know, they would maybe stop for a little break, have a little taco, and be on their way. The first published recipe, they do say, was in the early 1800s, you know, when there was a recipe in that it did say the taco, and that original recipe had...

corn tortilla filled with like a chile verde filling. How did tacos come to the United States if they originated in Mexico?

Well, I would say tacos originally came in California through the miners that were mining there. They took that same idea. We can have tacos here, too, as we're working on these mines, because at that time, also, too, California was Mexico. Large parts of the western United States used to be part of Mexico. This includes California, Texas, New Mexico, Utah, Nevada, and parts of Colorado, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Wyoming.

They became a part of the United States after the Mexican-American War in 1848. But it wasn't until more than 100 years later, in the 1960s, that tacos became really, really popular all over the U.S.

Tacos in particularly spread like wildfire and the idea of tacos became a mainstream revolution throughout the US was actually in a little town in San Bernardino, the same town actually where another iconic brand that we all probably know called McDonald's started. And there was a guy there named Glenn Bell, aka the founder of Taco Bell. He originally...

had a fast food joint. He used to sell a place called Bell's Burgers where he used to sell hamburgers. But as...

McDonald's was happening down the road, he quickly realized that maybe the hamburger was not the route that he should take. And ironically enough, there was a place very close to him, a world famous now place in taco history called Meat La Cafe. They were making a little hard shell taco where they would fry corn tortilla,

And they would put a little bit of ground beef, shredded lettuce, a little tomato, a little bit of shredded cheese on top. And Glen Bell used to eat these things every night and would try and take a crack at figuring out how to make this. And eventually, I guess the owner of Vita Cafe invited him into the kitchen one day and was like, hey, I'm going to show you how you, because you keep coming in here every day and eating these things.

And eventually he learned how to do it. And then Mr. Glenn Bell decided to take this to his own establishment and make a fast food restaurant called Taco Bell that we all know. But yeah, tacos after Glenn Bell got his hands on it would never be the same.

Hi, my name is Connor. I'm eight years old. I live in Winnipeg, Manitoba. And my question is, why are there soft shells and hard shells? And what are they made of?

This has to do with the crispiness of the tortilla. The crispy fried tortillas make for hard-shell tacos you find at fast food chains like Taco Bell and in the grocery store. I think the idea for what most Americans think of tacos is actually that hard-shell taco. But, you know, it's the evolution of the taco, you know? Edgar says those hard-shell tacos are an American invention. Traditionally, in Mexico, tortillas tend to be soft. We'll talk more about that in a little bit.

But food is fascinating because it's always changing and reflecting how our cultures are changing. As people move from one place to another, they bring the foods that they grew up with. But sometimes you have to switch things up a bit and use ingredients that are more easily available where you are now. Sometimes, especially if you open up a restaurant, you make changes to make the dish more approachable to local customers. Think about other foods that are really popular in the United States that originated elsewhere, like pizza.

People coming into the United States as immigrants brought along their favorite regional dishes, and then they blended them with the ingredients, like tomatoes, that were available in their new home. And so our food is always changing and adapting.

Sarah says tacos followed a similar path. Taco Tuesday, that never used to be a thing. There's different foods feel very unfamiliar or scary, but then they become sort of the fabric of

of that culture over time. For a while, Japanese food, Korean food, there was a stigma around them and the same thing with Mexican food. And now tacos are a part of that culture. It's burgers, pizza, and tacos. It's now in the American lexicon of food, which is kind of crazy. Now that we're up to the present day, let's talk about what a taco is and isn't. Turns out there's a lot of debate. My name is Kashtan and I'm six years old.

and I live in Kalamazoo, Michigan, and I'm in first grade. And why do tacos have sauce? To make them more delicious more than anything. Uh,

If we're looking at a basic street taco, in essence, the foundation of it is the tortilla, your filling. And it doesn't always necessarily have to be meat. It can be vegetables. One of my favorite tacos in the world is actually my mom's rajas con crema, which is a simple dish of roasted chilies with a little bit of cheese and a little bit of heavy cream all mixed together. It's delicious.

But when you're adding your salsa to your taco, that for me, it's the part that kind of adds that little magic, adds that little bit of jazz to your taco. And it's nice because, you know, most taquerias that you go to, they will let you kind of choose whether it's how spicy do you want it. Do you like salsas that are a little more bold and smokiness? Or do you want something that's a lot fresher, like an avocado salsa or like a guacamole per se?

That's just the personalization, the customization of the taco for you. That's kind of the fun part for me about the tacos. And some people don't even put salsa on there. Like it's a choose-your-own-adventure. If you're like, I'm a meat and potatoes guy and I just want the tortilla, the meat, maybe some onions on top of it. Like you can do that too. You won't be judged for the way that you build your taco because it is a very personal thing.

So go for it. We're here to support it. We're here to support the taco in every shape and form. So the key is we listen and we don't judge.

Hi, my name is Leah. I'm five years old and I live in Winnipeg, Manitoba. What kind of meat do you put in tacos? Now, you both said you can have whatever you want in your taco, but can you list off some of the popular meats and types of meats and ways that meat is cooked in tacos just to start getting our mouths watering?

Absolutely. So I would say in America, the four most popular, I feel like, meats ordered on a taco, one of them is probably going to be the one I feel like that everyone knows, which is carne asada. Carne asada is traditionally a northern style of making meat in which you

people in the north of Mexico will just get some really great beef and they'll just literally simply marinate it, hit it with a little salt and grill it over an open fire, chop it up, put it onto a tortilla and voila, carne asada taco. And then another taco style that has a lot of cool history to it is the al pastor taco. The al pastor taco means the shepherd's taco and this was actually an invention that was brought over by

The Lebanese people who immigrated over to Mexico in the late 1800s, they actually used to make a little shawarma...

But then, you know, a lot of the clientele of Mexican people were there, wanted something a little more spicy. And they didn't actually like lamb as much. So they wanted to maybe use another protein that was more suitable for their palate. So they transitioned to pork. Eventually that evolved to where we've gotten now, to the modern day al pastor taco, which

Then somehow, I don't know where exactly in the history, but pineapple was added to the taco and it has become an iconic street food all throughout Mexico and the U.S. And then I would say the third most popular style is probably going to be carnitas. Carnitas is also a regional style of taco making or meat making, typically found in the state of Michoacan. And with that, you take just pork

pork, literally tender and falling off the bone. And the last one I would say also is barbacoa. That's another very, very popular style of meat making that's also traditionally found in the north, but specifically comes from a place called Texcoco. You build a big fire pit underneath the earth, at least like five to six feet generally is what you want to give yourself. But after you build this hole, you then lay

line it with a bunch of bricks, and then you make a big, big, big fire. And then after that fire burns down and you just have a bed of embers, you then add in your pot with your meat in it, and then you bury it. And you let it cook overnight for about 10 to 12 hours. And the next day you have a delicious, delicious treat in front of you, which is called barbacoa. But if you're not a big lover of meat, there are still lots of different types of tacos you might really like.

In coastal regions of Mexico, for example, you'll find fish and seafood tacos. And there are also many types of tacos that are vegetarian. There's something called hoja santa, which is this sort of like anisey, kind of smoky herb that grows that they use a lot. There's a lot of different applications, like with...

squash with pumpkins with mushrooms and thinking about like the pre-Hispanic side of Mexico there were a lot more vegetable forward dishes so for any vegetarians or vegans out there you can make still a really beautiful and delicious taco. Yum I am salivating just hearing about all of these delicious taco types.

Coming up, we'll talk about why tortillas, and especially corn tortillas, are such an important part of Mexican cuisine. Stay tuned. I'm Jane Lindholm. Today on But Why, we're talking all things tacos. We've learned about some of the most popular meat-based taco fillings, carne asada, al pastor, carnitas, and barbacoa. We've also talked about salsa, the sauce. But if we're talking about tacos, we have to talk about the tortillas.

After all, the tortilla is what holds everything together. I mentioned earlier that traditionally in Mexico, tortillas are soft and round and made with flour or corn. But people have been making tortillas with corn for much longer than with flour. And that's because corn is a native vegetable to Mexico, whereas wheat, which is what flour is made of, isn't.

At Nix de Taqueria, where our guests Edgar Rico and Sarah Marden-Biggy work, they are sticking with corn. There's a phrase called sin maíz, no hay país, which means without corn, there's not a country, there's not a culture. It's a huge part of the culture in Mexico. It's part of the DNA. They said that was part of the first civilizations there. It's how it sustained them. Sin maíz, no hay país. Without corn, there's no country.

Wow, that gives you a sense of how important corn is to Mexican culture and cuisine. But for corn to become a tortilla, it first needs to go through an ancient process called nixtamalization,

That's a really big word. Nixtamalization is a word that sounds very daunting, but it's just a word for essentially the signs and the magic of what happens to corn for you to create a corn tortilla. You can't have corn tortilla without nixtamalizing corn. And the process in which you break down this corn to get you a corn tortilla starts with you getting some really beautiful dried corn,

Preferably heirloom. And heirloom basically means an older species or genus or type of a vegetable or an animal or a plant.

Absolutely, yeah. So in Mexico specifically, there are over 30 varieties of corn that are native to Mexico. And they can come in all sorts of different vast colors from green, purple, red. You then add this corn to some water that's boiling. And inside of this water, you're going to add the secret magical ingredient called cal.

Gal essentially is a derivative of limestone and you're gonna actually let it cook for about 30 to 45 minutes and then after cooking the corn in this boiling water you actually let it sit and you let it sit overnight and soak in this solution for about 10 to 12 hours and that's as it's soaking the magic of nixtamalization is happening and essentially with nixtamalization it's gonna help break

break down this corn for you to actually be able to digest it better. The human body isn't very good at digesting the outer layer of a corn kernel, which is why if you have corn on the cob for dinner, it'll mostly pass right through your digestive system untouched, which you already know if you listened to our recent poop episode.

But nixtamalization changes the chemical structure of the corn and makes it easier for our bodies to digest. So the magic of nixtamalization helps unlock corn's fullest potential. So it unlocks all the natural nutrients that are in within corn. It also activates the natural glutens and starches that are within the corn for you to be able to help make a corn tortilla. In essence, that is kind of the magic of how nixtamalization works and

why it's a really special thing to do. But this thing also is thousands of thousands of years old and it's something that we still get to carry on today and doing this tradition of making tortillas and it's a cool way to kind of almost kind of look back into the past in a way. And it's a slow food. It's about

14 to 15 hours from start to finish, from the time you take the corn, the time you're cooking it, to the time it sits overnight for about 10 hours, to the following morning when we actually grind the corn in a masa.

We have something inside our restaurant called a molino, which is a wet mill. So it is where you take two wheels, and they're made out of volcanic stones with different etchings in there. So as the corn is going through there, it's really grinding against each other and making that masa. Masa, by the way, is dough that's made from corn. So it takes a lot of time, a lot of skill. The amount of love that goes into it is huge.

It's not a one-hour thing. You have to really take the time and put some care into it. And Sarah says this love and care begins on the farm. A lot of farmers who choose to grow heirloom varieties of corn do it because they care deeply about the land they cultivate. My name is Faye. I'm six years old, and I live in Alameda, California. Why is corn different colors?

My name is Eve. I am seven years old. I live in New York. Why are some corn kernels yellow and some white?

You mentioned corn can come in many different colors. Why does it come in different colors? There's different climates and different factors that play into why corn ends up becoming different colors. So one of them is, you know, just the natural genetics of some of these corns. Like those 30 varieties are naturally just have these colors that they've been growing in that fashion for many years.

But the climate will take a big part in that, too. So, you know, maybe some climates are a little wetter and you're going to have just a different hue in terms of the color of the corn, but also where it's grown even. I mean, we happen to grow corn right in our backyard, actually, because we have a big farm in our backyard. And last year we noticed that some of the corn...

because we grew two different varieties, but on this border of where we were growing some of this purple corn and some of this red corn, some of that corn started fusing together because the way corn releases its seeds is through the top. When you see these little kind of like

hairs of corn you'll see that that's where some of the seeds get released into the air sometimes as it's landing on these silks of corn they'll just kind of latch onto it and then it'll start taking fold into the corn and you'll get this really beautiful kind of cross color of corn that'll be purple and yellow or it might be like the one that we had that was purple and pink

Learning about how tortillas are made was making me hungry. So I asked Edgar to show me how they do it at Nixta. We are here in the Nixta Taqueria kitchen about to make some tortillas. What you're hearing right now is our corn being mixed up. It's been ground up. We're adding a little bit of salt to it just to give it a little bit of flavor. I'll let you first peel.

So it's gonna feel... - Kind of like Play-Doh. - Exactly, that's exactly what I always tell people. You're gonna feel like a light moisture in your hand as you're kind of moving it around your hands. And yeah, the texture is very much so like Play-Doh. And then this one in particular, we're adding a little bit of guajillo chili so we can get a really nice bright red hue and also a little bit of flavor. And at this point, we are ready to make a corn tortilla.

And with this machine, it's gonna help roll your corn. It's gonna roll it onto this roller. And what we're looking for is for it to catch fully like so. You kinda see how that's catching right now? That's exactly what we're looking for. And now we're gonna start bringing them out like so. And then it has three different layers where we're gonna cook our corn tortilla.

So this one on the top is gonna be your lowest temperature. The middle's gonna have the medium heat, and the bottom is gonna have the highest heat ratio. Boom, it's gonna go on through the bottom, and then it's gonna come out through here on the bottom. - So that's now a cooked tortilla. - Yeah. Eat it. - Really delicious.

You definitely taste that flavor. It's so much different than a store-bought corn tortilla. Oh yeah, for sure. You get like all those really nice earthy notes and that they're nice and soft and pillowy. They're really lovely. Edgar told me they make over a thousand tortillas every day at Nixta Taqueria. We're going to post some videos from Nixta's kitchen on our Instagram page at butwhy__kids so you can watch Edgar make a fresh tortilla too.

Has your idea of a perfect taco changed at all listening to this episode? What type of taco are you most excited to try next? We'd love to know. But here's a really controversial question we have for you. Is a taco a sandwich? What do you think? Have your adult record a video of you telling us whether you think a taco counts as a sandwich and why or why not.

We'll share videos on our Instagram and YouTube pages. You can get an adult to help you see them. Thanks to Edgar Rico and Sarah Marden-Biggy of Nixta Taqueria in Austin, Texas. It was so cool to visit their restaurant. That's it for this episode. If you have a question about anything, have an adult record you asking it. It's easy to do on a smartphone using an app like Voice Memos. Then have your adult email it to questions at butwhykids.org.

But Why is produced by Melody Beaudet, Sarah Baik, and me, Jane Lindholm, at Vermont Public, and distributed by PRX. Our video producer is Joey Palumbo. Check out our YouTube series, But Why Bites? We put out a short, bite-sized video episode every other Friday. Our theme music is by Luke Reynolds. We'll be back in two weeks with an all-new episode. Until then, stay curious. And hungry. From PRX.