Here’s the Trending team’s main character of the week: It’s restaurant tortilla chips.
Their day in the sun is here. For all of eternity, the Mexican and Tex-Mex table staples have enjoyed a fixed existence.
You snack on them before a meal. They are delicious and we eat too many of them.
But this week they went viral because we finally dared to wonder why they tasted better in person. Turns out it wasn’t a placebo effect brought on by ambiance.
As we reported this week in one of our Trending team’s top-trafficked stories:
“There is a secret—and service industry worker Keilah is spilling the (refried) beans about it on her TikTok account.
Keilah posted video evidence of the secret on Sept. 18. Now her story has over 1.2 million views and counting.”
The truth is crunchy.
Why are restaurant chips so tasty?
This one feels silly once you realize how obvious the answer is. They are often fresh. Made on-site. The worker’s job is partly to cut tortillas for chips.
As we observed: “The tortillas are so fresh they practically stick together even after she halves and quarters them with a large kitchen knife.
She then ‘shuffles’ the uncooked sliced tortillas, getting them ready to be deep-fried in oil shortly before they come out hot restaurant tortilla chips to waiting customers.”
That said, my favorite Tex-Mex restaurant, Casa Garcia’s in South Austin, has top-shelf tortilla chips that are bagged. But then again they also feature a tortilla-making station where at all hours of the day three elderly Hispanic women make fresh tortillas.
So now I wonder if their fresh tortillas are later sliced into chips and ultimately bagged.
Wait, why are they so filling though?
We touched on that too. If you eat 4 chips you’ve eaten a whole tortilla. That’s like 20 carbs. And you’ll eat like 12 chips minimum.
But you’ve earned that hearty pre-meal meal. And in the age of chip inflation, it may not be a bad idea to make your own at home.
So how do I do that? Should I just make my own tortillas at home?
Sure. It’s three ingredients!
But if you’re like me and your oven is used for storage space, just go to HEB and get their cheap “restaurant style” chips. It’s like $2.
If you don’t live near an HEB, then yeah you’re in trouble. And so we follow the customer success journey back to your area Mexican or Tex-Max eatery.
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