Month: July 2018

Austin chilaquiles rankings, part 1

This is a post in my series ranking all of the chilaquiles in Austin. It is not a serious endeavor because they’re all good chilaquiles, Brent.

What are chilaquiles? They are a Mexican “use up all the leftovers” dish usually served for breakfast in Tex-Mex restaurants. Tortilla chips are cooked in salsa and topped with cheese and eggs. 

Chilaquiles coated in cheese
Los Altos Taqueria

Los Altos

These are the chilaquiles that started it all for me. They weren’t the first I ever fell in love with, but they were so good they set me on the quest to see if there could possibly be any better in Austin. The salsa roja is just spicy enough and it douses the chips in just the right quantity. The refried beans are not a requirement of chilaquiles, but they are my favorite accompaniment. At Los Altos, they give you plenty of rich refried pintos. The whole plate is topped off with a large dollop of sour cream that provides the tartness needed to cut through the rich beans. What really earns these chilaquiles top rank, however, is the cheese. Los Altos uses a creamy Oaxacan that melts completely onto the chips. It’s chilaquiles perfection.

Fried egg over chilaquiles
Gloria’s Chilaquiles from Eldorado Cafe

Eldorado Cafe

Eldorado Cafe veers slightly from traditional Tex-Mex in order to be a little more hip. Usually that solicits a side-eye, but here it really works. Like Los Altos, they have creamy melty cheese and sour cream. Their salsas here are amazing so whichever you choose for your chilaquiles will be delicious. You can pick your sides according to the menu, but I seem to remember them just giving me beans and potatoes without asking. That’s fine; I love beans! Usually I can do without breakfast potatoes, but these were “three potato hash,” with tiny bites of sweet potato and rajas mixed in. Every component on the plate shows attention to detail and flavor.

flattened steak on top of chilaquiles and beans
Veracruz All Natural

Veracruz All Natural

I had the chilaquiles at Veracruz’s brick-and-mortar location off of Research. Publications like Texas Monthly have called Veracruz  tacos “best of Austin,” so I was disappointed with the chilaquiles. They make their own corn tortillas and fry them for the chilaquiles, which actully works against them here. Chips made from tortilla tend to be than the chips that usually add the crunch to chilaquiles in restaurants. There were are also several inconsistencies and service errors that prevented us from fully enjoying our chilaquiles. We ordered two plates and one was drenched in salsa while the ther had barely enough to even distinguish the dish from a pile of chips. The eggs were cooked differently in each dish too, with one dish having eggs that were well overcooked. Maybe it was an off day; we were sharing a table with strangers because the restaurant was packed and our companions complained about their dishes too. As for sides, it came topped with steak and sides of beans and maduros. I LOVE maduros–sweet plantains–so my eyes turned heart-shaped when I saw them on the menu. The steak however… I don’t really eat meat, so I ordered the chilaquiles vegetarian but still had to pay the same price. When I finally got my plate after a long wait, sure enough, there it was.

Chilaquiles on a metal tray
El Tacorrido

El Tacorrido

Of all of the chilaquiles I’ve tried in Austin, these were the most fast food-like but I really enjoyed them Full disclosure: I was absolutely ravenous so my judgement was impaired by the sheer pleasure of eating. The chips were crunchy, and the beans were basic in a good way. With beans, you don’t need to get fancy. The potatoes were basic in what I would consider a bad way. They were potatoes, that’s the best that could be said for them. One unique element was the eggs. These were the only chilaquiles I’ve had in Austin where the egg was scrambled. This is the more traditional Mexican way, but given a choice, I always ask for my eggs fried or over easy. Maybe the traditional Mexican way is better though; the scrambled eggs interlace with the chips, giving a good proportion of each item per bite. The only cheese was cotija, though, which is my least favorite cheese. Overall, a solid offering.

Current ranking:

  1. Los Altos
  2. Eldorado Cafe
  3. El Tacorrido
  4. Veracruz All Natural

Things I don’t know how I lived without (Part 2 of 2)

Last week I wrote about the things I didn’t know how I lived without. This week is less dramatic. I could certainly live without these things, but I am going to recommend them anyway because they have made my life marginally better.

As an example of how frivolous but great some of these things are, the first thing I’m going to recommend is a bag of sugar cubes. Not only sugar cubes but ~*~fancy~*~ sugar cubes. I popped into our local Whole Foods competitor for some item I could only get there and, like always, I ended up walking away with a handful of unnecessary things like jade rice and a bag of fancy sugar cubes. I think I mostly wanted to see what made a fancy sugar cube fancy (spoiler: I am still not sure). That was over a year ago, and despite using them pretty regularly, I still have a lot. What I’ve discovered is that they can be used to turn a bottle of Andre’ into champagne cocktails. Put a fancy sugar cube in a champagne flute. Sprinkle on some bitters. When you pour in the champagne, the sugar cube fizzes up like a science experiment. Guests find it delightful and it requires no mixing skills. Also think how hard core you look when you make your guests an Old Fashioned. It’s like you just morphed from one of the non-David Beckham-banging Spices into Posh Spice.

My next suggestion is decidedly un-Posh, though. (Bye-bye, David Beckham). I think everyone should have a supply of paper plates. You don’t want to have a reason to hesitate about having your friends over. If you’re worried about the environment, let me put it this way: if you have so many friends over for dinner that it actually affects climate change, you are probably also bringing a great amount of joy into the world.

Speaking of joy, let me introduce you to my salt pig.

A ceramic container of salt shaped like a pig

Anything that makes it easier to properly salt your food is worth it. I’m not going to lie and pretend that I would like this as much if it didn’t look like a cute little pig. In programming, we have a concept called “rubber duck debugging”. The idea is that you can talk your problem through with anyone, even an actual rubber duckie like the one I have on my desk, and the process of talking it through helps you solve it. In my kitchen, instead of a rubber duck, I have Salt Pig. I complain to him about how my dish just doesn’t taste right and I’m worried. He always suggests the same solution: “add more salt.”

My last life recommendation is to buy a knife sharpener. We’ve all heard that a dull knife is more dangerous than a sharp one. I’m personally a little skeptical, but I will heartily agree that a dull knife is less enjoyable. Even when I barely cooked for myself at all, I understood the value of a knife sharpener, I just grew up poor and was not a person who was in the habit of buying things. See my entry on pot holders if you need further proof of the lengths I go to to avoid buying things. In addition to it costing money, adding a knife sharpener had an difficulty level because you had to know how to use it, I thought. Turns out that I was confusing a knife sharpener with a honing steel, which is used to straighten the blade. A knife sharpener, instead, is generally simple to use and you can even get automatic ones. The one I had cost $5 and was worth it for the sheer amount of frustration it removed from my life.

Alright, comments are open. What item did you put off buying for a ridiculously long time only to discover what a fool you were?