Winterify Your Taco Tuesday With This Tacky, Tortilla-Topped Taco Soup

January 19, 2025

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Why It Works

Charring a medley of aromatics, together with onion, garlic, and chiles, and mixing them with canned fire-roasted tomatoes offers the soup a deep smoky taste.
Including crushed tortilla chips to the simmering pot helps to thicken the soup and enhances the savory corn taste.
Filling particular person bowls with soup after which broiling them briefly with a layer of tortilla chips and cheese creates an ideal crunchy, tacky topping.

Once in a while, a Tex Mex-style floor beef taco actually hits the spot. It was a transfer my mother used to make now and again, throwing a packet of taco seasoning into some floor beef and serving the meat combination with exhausting taco shells, and fixings like diced tomato, lettuce, bitter cream, cilantro, avocado, and shredded cheese. It was a satisfying dinner excellent for a weeknight. Right here we’ve spun the nostalgic Taco Tuesday–model taco on its head with our simple recipe for a deeply comforting, savory taco soup that hits all of the notes of the basic.

Our Birmingham, Alabama-based colleague Elizabeth Mervosh developed this thick and hearty taco-inspired soup, which options floor beef, corn, and pinto beans swimming in a flavorful purée of canned fire-roasted tomatoes, charred onion, garlic, jalapeño, and cubanelle peppers. Earlier than being served, the soup is laddled into particular person bowls, topped with cheese and tortilla chips and broiled till it’s crispy and melty on high. It’s a particular step up from the typical Taco Tuesday dinner.

A primary look at this taco soup’s components—floor beef, beans, chiles, canned tomatoes—would possibly make you surprise how this soup is completely different from chili. However whereas there may be actually some overlap, this soup is far brothier and thinner than the typical chili, that means you may serve each in the identical week with out anybody feeling like they’re consuming the identical factor for days in a row (not that there is something fallacious with that).

Critical Eats / Fred Hardy

Method Ideas for an Unparalleled Taco Soup Expertise

Add deep taste with a charred tomato purée base. To make this soup actually particular, it is value taking only a few minutes to char the onion, garlic, and chiles (a mix of candy Cubanelles or banana peppers and mildly spicy jalapeños) in a dry skillet earlier than mixing these aromatics with canned fire-roasted tomatoes. Charring the greens for the soup earlier than mixing them provides a slight smoky taste and likewise brings out the sweetness within the Cubanelle pepper. Make sure that to prepare dinner the greens till they’re blistered and have brown spots throughout. This ensures they develop a sturdy taste that can permeate the broth.

Bloom the spice combination in oil. For a real Taco Tuesday expertise, you’ve gotta embrace taco seasoning, and we made positive to make use of a beneficiant quantity to attain that particular taste. We advocate utilizing our home made taco seasoning recipe, however your most well-liked taco seasoning mix will work simply as properly (I’ll all the time have a delicate spot in my coronary heart for Outdated El Paso’s taco packets).

For the perfect taste, be sure that to bloom the spice combination within the oil till it’s aromatic and absolutely coated within the oil earlier than including the bottom beef. The bottom spices within the seasoning mix have taste molecules which might be largely fat-soluble, which suggests they may dissolve extra readily into the oil than they might right into a watery broth base. On the identical time, because the taco seasoning heats and toasts within the oil, its taste will develop into extra aromatic and complicated. Simply be sure that so as to add the meat earlier than the taco seasoning scorches—you’ll want to have the bundle opened and able to add to the pan.

Simmer the soup for only a few minutes. It is likely to be tempting to slowly simmer an enormous pot of soup on the stovetop for an extended time period with the mindset that the longer the soup simmers, the extra taste will develop. However this isn’t the case with taco soup. As a substitute, limiting the simmering time to about 10 minutes helps you keep away from overcooking the bottom beef, which might simply flip dry, pebbly, and ugly to eat if simmered for too lengthy.

End with a tacky, crunchy topping earlier than serving. It wouldn’t be a taco soup with out the tacos. For the “taco” factor on this soup, Elizabeth makes use of retailer purchased tortilla chips in two other ways. First, she stirs crushed tortilla chips into the soup’s broth to assist thicken the soup and add savory, toasted corn taste.

Along with the crushed chips within the broth, you may additionally layer tortilla chips after which cheese over the person soup bowls and broil till the cheese is simply melted. This creates an ideal crunchy, tacky taco-like topping.

Completed with a simple contemporary salsa, this soup has all the textures and flavors of an ideal floor beef taco in a single huge bowl of comforting soup.

This recipe was developed by Elizabeth Mervosh; the headnote was written by Leah Colins.